


portrait of a julio-claudian man

by familiar



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Abortion, Angst, Bad Parenting, Character Study, Future Fic, M/M, Middle-age, Step-parents, Unreliable Narrator, what's so wrong with hockey anyway?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-07 11:37:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 53,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12840339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/pseuds/familiar
Summary: When everything is taken together—the abortion, the proposal, Thanksgiving dinner, his mother—Kent Parson has a very long November.





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> LISTEN SORRY I don't usually do this but I think this fic, in this fandom, requires some advisory notes up front:
> 
>  **This fic is all written!** I'll be posting in four batches on a weekly basis. It's a sequel of sorts to [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11720286) and I have written about 10k of a story that bridges that earlier fic and this one here. I can't promise it'll get posted but, well, this is one of those ideas that got quickly out of hand. Let's see what happens, I guess.
> 
> Please heed the warnings about angst--this is basically my attempt to write a canon-compliant (as of 3.22, anyway) endgame Jack/Parse fic, and it's a relationship not without its problems, as you can imagine. Also, some of Kent's perceptions and opinions are pretty distorted. 
> 
> My beta reader was [Querulousgawks](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks), whose expert services I purchased through [Fandom Trumps Hate](https://fandomtrumpshate.tumblr.com/) and to whom I owe a lot of thanks for help on this fic. If you want to hire your own beta who's much better than you really deserve _and_ help out some very worthy causes, the 2018 version of the auction will be getting underway soon!
> 
> Finally, special thanks is owed to [tomato_greens](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/) who isn't just a g.d. enabler, she's a breath of fresh air and has given me tons of feedback and moral support on this project. And she's written some pretty awesome Jack/Parse fic herself! [Check that out if you haven't.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11720124)

It is so rare to get a call from Greer that Kent is sure it’s one of two things before he picks up the phone: Someone is dead, or she wants something.

“Hi,” he says, trying to be casual. Though he’s known Greer practically her entire life, and a solid chunk of his, there’s really no way to be chill with your partner’s kid with another man. You can like her, Kent figures, though he isn’t sure that he does, but she’s never going to stop being a reminder that there’s a part of Jack that can’t be urged into their relationship, longevity be damned. His therapist told him that.

“Hey,” she says; it sounds quiet where she is, like she’s sitting in her dorm room. “How’s my dad?”

Polite people, Kent thinks, would ask how _you_ were doing. “He’s good,” Kent says slowly. Maybe it’s not true; hard to say. “You know, getting on. He’s been having a lot of headaches lately. He’s in the other room, um. Did you want to talk to him?”

“I get headaches, too,” Greer offers, and now Kent knows that this is not going to be their standard twice-yearly phone call when they talk about what to get Jack for his birthday or Christmas. “That sucks.”

“Did you want to talk to him?” Kent repeats. The thing about the headaches is true, and currently Jack is lying in a dark room with a damp washcloth over his face. When Kent had offered it he’d become wide-eyed and said, “Kenny, are you trying to suffocate me?”

“Not really,” Kent had said, because, no, not really.

“Uh, no, I said not,” she repeats, getting a little annoyed. Now he knows something is really wrong, because all of the cloying Bittle enthusiasm has dried up. “Anyway, I’m calling because I need a thousand dollars.”

It’s early November, it’s already cold up in Quebec, and this is bullshit. “A thousand dollars,” Kent repeats.

“Well, nine-hundred-fifty,” she repeats. “Maybe you don’t know but my dad only gives me so much every month, and I spent a lot of that on books, so—”

“Okay.” He’s still not sure of her angle.

“And, I don’t know, what are you up to?”

“I’m sitting in the kitchen eating overnight oats for lunch.”

“No,” she says, and he can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “What are you doing this weekend?”

He is desperate to know what her game is, but if she’s not telling, well.  “We were thinking of driving up to a Remparts game,” he says, digging around in his bowl for some blueberries. They are definitely driving up to a Remparts game; he isn’t making it up. “They’re doing great this season, actually, and they’re playing Rimouski Saturday afternoon, so we were talking about making it kind of a romantic, uh—thing.” All true. He hopes she reports that back to Bittle.

“Could you come down to Poughkeepsie?”

“He really wants to see this game,” Kent says. “I think he got tickets and everything.”

“No,” she all but grits out. “Just you.”

Kent is not going to make it easy on her. “I don’t know.” He’s grinning into his oats. “Your dad’s got his heart set on it, and I promised I’d drive, because of the headache thing, and also I put him on a diet—so he’s a little annoyed I think, but the doc said—well, who knows what he said, it can be hard to follow the fran-say, you know. With doctors. Most people, really.” Greer does not know any French.

“Fine,” she says. “Fine. I need a thousand bucks, and I need you to come down here, because I need an abortion.”

He puts his spoon down. “Oh.” It’s not fun anymore, suddenly.

“And you have to promise not to tell my parents.”

For some reason, the first thing that comes to Kent’s mind, and therefore the first thing that pops out of his mouth, is: “And what am I, chopped liver?” It’s something his seventh-grade English teacher had used to say, and something Kent always found very funny—but he hasn’t thought of it in many years. That guy was super gay, Kent realizes. It’s less startling than when he realized that he was super gay, that Jack was super gay, that at least a good handful of other guys in the NHL were super gay, and that they were all just going to go right on pretending that none of them had any fucking clue. Though, actually, who knows about Jack; they’ve been together-together for fifteen years, and he’s _still_ super evasive about what he did with girls. Probably nothing, Kent figures. If he’d done it, he’d have just said so.

“Oh my god,” Greer says, and she does sound like she’s on the verge of tears. “You are such a fucking asshole, I’m sorry, if I knew literally anybody better—”

And that really cuts to the core of things, doesn’t it: he’s just some kind of minced meat for these people, something to feed of off. But how can you say no? “You _don’t_ have anyone better?”

“Not who’s gonna like, pay for it? And I can’t just like do it at the student health services, that’s crazy. There’s a place in Waterbury where I made an appointment.”

“In freaking Connecticut? I haven’t even said yes yet,” Kent says, probably too harshly. “What happened to the father?”

“I’m not discussing that,” she says. “None of your business.”

“I’ll call you back,” he says. “Good talk, honey, say hi to your dad.”

“Kenny,” she says, but he cuts her off by ending the call.

Not sure what else to do, Kent stalks into the living room and pulls the washcloth off of Jack’s face.

“I was just starting to feel better,” Jack says.

“Why can’t girls just keep their legs closed?” Kent asks, collapsing into an armchair.

“What would I know about it?”

“Yeah,” says Kent. “And you’re not going to.”

Jack sits up and looks at him. “What?”

“Nothing, Zimms,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”

* * *

Kent has a long day, which gives him time to really mull things over. He finishes his oats and washes up, scrubbing down the counters and turning over the chicken he marinated the night before. It’s a sad sight, just two boneless, skinless breasts floating in a mix of orange juice and soy sauce. His mother used to cobble together a little of whatever was leftover in the fridge, and for some reason the soy-orange really stuck with him. Jack likes it, insofar as Jack has any opinions.

Well, mostly. As Kent slips into the hot tub after his workout, he’s reminded of the fact that it needs to be replaced, probably, this twenty-year-old thing. Maintaining it is a drag, and a new one won’t be cheap: the tub is now enclosed, without a large enough egress to artfully get it out, and then there’s the matter of buying a new one. When Kent had delivered the estimate, Jack pretty much hit the roof with, “I’m not paying thousands of dollars for a new hot tub! Are you out of your mind?”

Kent had never really looked at his finances in relation to Jack’s _that_ closely. It’s possible one of them is marginally richer than the other, but he’s happy to pay for the hot tub either way. They own the house together, having each put down half. It’s egalitarian, he tells himself.

He changes the litter and does some light vacuuming. He combs out the kitten, who is no longer a kitten, but she’s small and Jack seemed to believe the ad that bragged about a litter of Persian-ragdolls. She seems like a ragdoll, and makes it easy for him. He tries to track down the other two, but he only manages to find one, sitting on Jack’s lap while he eats lunch. It’s a very late lunch, nearly 4 now. Jack ought not eat so close to dinner, but Kent doesn’t needle him about it: he remembers finding it nearly impossible to keep his weight up near the end of the season. He, personally, probably isn’t eating even a thousand calories a day at this point.

“She won’t get off me,” Jack says, but he doesn’t seem bothered.

“She knows you’re comfy.” Kent pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down at the table. He reaches over to pet the cat and studies the food on Jack’s plate: a few leftover ribs, a piece of cornbread, coleslaw, beans. Leftovers from that place the other night—what was it called? Honestly, who can remember. Montreal is having a barbecue renaissance, according to some website. They usually try new places before a game, but Jack seemed to like that one. They should go back, because while Kent can’t remember what the hell it was called, he remembers where it is, and that’s how they’ll find it again.

“What time is your call?” Jack asks. He’s got sauce on his shirt, and probably isn’t aware of it.

“Five.”

“Seems late for a call.”

The call is with the director of athletics at BU, a big get for him. Nearly anyone is willing to talk to Kent Parson, but it’s less likely that someone wants to talk about changing how their industry functions. “I told him I had to make dinner,” Kent says, “so I won’t be on with him for very long.”

“Let me know if there’s something I can do,” Jack offers.

“Do you know anyone at Boston University?” When Jack shakes his head, Kent says, “Yeah, so, there’s nothing you can do.”

Jack’s enthusiasm for this project wavers somewhat between creepy intensity and supportive detachment, but that is the basic dichotomy of Jack Zimmermann.

He also lets the cat lick sauce off of his fingers.

“No, okay, no, you lost cat privileges.” Kent lifts her from Jack’s lap and she starts mewling and when he puts her down she races out of the room: typical.

Jack merely shrugs it off. “She’ll be back,” he says, and actually, that’s the unifying principle of Jack Zimmermann: she’ll be back. There is no such thing as losing, only temporary setbacks, or tiny little breaks. Kent stares out at Lake Brome and thinks, yep, that’s it, that’s what’s going on here.

While Jack eats noisily, Kent considers what to do about the weekend. He could ask Jack to let him out of it, claim something came up on his call, or with his mom, or just suggest that Jack did something wrong and Kent is pissed and Jack should know what he did. But the thing is, Kent wants to go: it’s their thirty-fifth anniversary, sort of. At least, it’s been thirty-five years since they started hooking up while playing junior hockey. It’s complicated, kind of, because of everything that happened in between. It’s also some measure of stability against the tenuous grasp Kent has on almost everything else in his life, just Jack as a thing he’s known as long as he’s known himself. And unlike his hockey career, he hasn’t had to leave Jack behind permanently—yet. That’s worth celebrating, right? At least it’s worth one junior hockey match and a couple nights of fucking in a suite at the Château Frontenac. The first time they fucked—well, “fucked,” not really, more like, some twelve-second premature ejaculation grope in the dark, but—was also in Quebec City, and also after a Remparts game. Jack is thoughtful like that. It was probably October, not November, but, close enough.

But Kent doesn’t want to turn Greer down; it’s just that she’s a little shit, and maybe she deserves what’s coming to her, and she’s demanding, and it’s awfully presumptuous to think that Kent would have nothing better to do.

So he’ll just ask her to push her appointment back a week, and if she balks, or if she can’t, she can just—well, not have the baby, obviously. She can call Bittle and get him involved. It’s probably what she should have done in the first place, but it’s not like Kent can’t guess why she didn’t. He feels bad for her, sometimes.

“Do you want a rib?” Jack asks.

Kent turns to look at him, needing a shave with his hair a little too long, his performance fleece unzipped, sauce pretty much everywhere, napkin or no. It’s not the glamorous and exciting and cosmopolitan life Kent would fantasize about when they were 16 or 24 or 37, or whatever. But, it’s a lot better than the desperate Las Vegas puck bunny Kent always feared he would have to ultimately end up with.

“No thanks,” Kent says, shaking his head. “That’s your lunch, you eat it.”

Greer texts quite a bit. “Well?” she asks, while Kent is on the phone with Winston McEvers from Boston University. “Are you doing this on purpose?” she asks, while Kent is weighing out portions of raw food in frozen pellets. He’s always wanted to make his own, but he can’t get the bone meal around Brome and he hasn’t looked into where he _could_ get it—the city, maybe, but every time he’s in the city it’s to see a doctor or watch a hockey game or visit Jack’s parents.

“Sorry,” he imagines himself saying, “just gonna pop out for some bone meal, see you guys.”

“Bring me back some,” Bob would say, which would be funny, but then Jack would get pissed. Sometimes Kent can see these things pretty clearly, and so he doesn’t even try to do them. He ought to just buy a damn grinder and toss the fish right in, bones and all. Maybe sometime, Kent tells himself. He takes one dish off the scale and moves onto the next, already feeling guilty because he knows he should do what’s best for his babies, and he isn’t, and—jeez, they’re just cats, Parse, keep it together.

He takes a picture of the bowl of cat food on the scale, and sends it Greer with the caption, “Dinner.”

“Why are you doing this?” she writes back, while he’s slicing carrots for the human dinner currently in preparation.

It’s one of those things where he isn’t sure what he’s doing to her, or if she’s doing something to him. He knows he’s being an asshole, and that she’s suffering, and that he shouldn’t be an asshole who causes her to suffer. At the same time preventing her suffering isn’t his responsibility, and she hasn’t even pretended to be nice to him in order to get what she wants. It’s infuriating, the more he thinks about it.

“How’s Greer doing?” Kent asks Jack, when they sit down to dinner.

Jack gets that soft look in his eyes that he develops when Greer is the topic of conversation. “She hasn’t—we haven’t talked lately,” he says sadly, counting out spoonsful of carrots. They came out well-caramelized and Kent beams for a moment at how he figured it out all by himself, until he remembers a split second later that Jack is saying something: “Usually she sends me an e-mail every week but she didn’t this week. I hope she’s okay.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Kent says. He takes fifteen carrot slices and puts three back in the dish. They are miniscule, nearly slivers. “What’s she taking?”

“Media studies stuff. She sent me her schedule. I don’t know. It’s not like when I was in college.”

“You think she’ll major in that?”

“When I was in college,” Jack continues, apparently not caring what his daughter will major in, “there was no discussion of what you were going to do after college. I had plans, but those were my plans. The school didn’t talk about jobs.”

“What did the school talk about, then?” Kent asks, as if Jack didn’t rail about this the entire time Greer was doing college searches and applications and graduating high school and moving across the country. One thing Jack and Bittle have recently agreed on was that Greer should definitely attend that college in particular, but she refused to apply there.

“Learning. Knowledge.”

“Maybe they knew you’d be fine because you would go into the NHL.”

“ ‘They’ didn’t. None of my friends had an easy time.” This doesn’t quite stack up to what Kent knows about Jack’s college friends, but if he’s going to be like that, fine.

“But they must have had an office of career services.”

“No one ever told me to go there.”

“Again—actually, you know what? Never mind.”

“Did you make salmon?”

Kent suddenly remembers they’re at the dinner table. “Oh, no, uh, chicken.” He gets up to fetch it and all three cats, who have been sitting patiently under the table, follow him into the kitchen. The kitten, Hazel, goes back to get a morsel of food; it takes time to thaw, and the Himalayans don’t have the patience for it. Instead, they mewl for attention, or maybe bits of orange-soy-infused chicken, while Kent cuts the breasts into uneven strips, and then uneven chunks. The nutritionist said it would be more satisfying to eat it slowly, in smaller bites, instead of inhaling the whole meal in three minutes.

“If you give so much as one bite to these cats—”

“This is such old-people food,” Jack says, as he watches Kent scrape the chunks of chicken onto his plate.

“Well, sorry I can’t stop the aging process.”

Jack makes a face like Kent is being snotty, but he isn’t being snotty, just honest. He does wish he could do that. Who wouldn’t? He is sorry.

“What do you think she can do with a degree in media studies?” Kent asks. He’s proud of himself for ignoring the cats as they cruelly attempt to interrupt his dinner. He would love nothing more than to get down on his hands and knees (because he’s bionic, and he can) and pull them both into his arms and kiss their furry paws and dark baby faces, which still look kittenish, perhaps even more so than Hazel, and she is Kent’s kitten baby and always will be no matter how old. But Kent is a grown-up and he’s trying to model good behavior, so instead of doing any of that he takes a serving of bulgur-brown rice pilaf (left over from two nights ago) and a serving of arugula in lemon and olive oil. Jack can bitch if he wants but there’s something soothing about a plate all made up in various colors and textures. It’s mostly arugula, but Kent will take it. Feels legitimate.

“I don’t know.” Jack is already plowing through his meal, and Kent puts a hand on his thigh, then moves it to Jack’s forearm—that sometimes gets him to slow down. At least he finishes chewing before taking another bite. “I don’t know, but Bittle thinks it’ll be a great idea.”

“You talked to him?”

Jack just shrugs.

“Well, what does Bittle think she can do with a media studies degree?”

“Produce video content, probably.” Jack shoves three pieces of chicken into his mouth at one time. “It’s good,” he says through a mouth of half-chewed chicken, which is Jack trying to be nice.

“Great, so eat it more slowly.”

“Don’t tell me how to eat.” Jack pulls his arm away.

They could very easily have a fight here, where Kent says something like, “Well, I don’t want you to die of hypertension” and Jack replies with, like, “Well, who cares if I do, it’s not up to you,” which is the kind of thing that makes Kent’s heart break, because Jack has never been overly invested in staying alive for Kent’s sake, like, historically. So, not wanting to have a fight—he’s still recovering from the one about the hot tub—Kent just says, “I’m really looking forward to the weekend.”

“Same,” Jack agrees, and then he babbles about junior hockey, mentions he wants to see the Saguenéens this season. There’s something about those games—it’s fine to sit behind the Habs bench and watch the whole game unfold, but hockey is irresistible when it’s played by teenage boys. Those games are so fraught, weirdly pure. Kent knows first-hand nothing in this world is pure, and least of all the fucking Q. It really puts things in perspective.

Jack agrees to clean up dinner, which is nothing short of miraculous.

Kent could do any number of things: brush the cats, vacuum the curtains, turn on a game. Instead, he goes for a walk down to the mailbox, and calls Bittle. It’s like a kind of penance, because the cold jams right into his hip and he feels every step, despite the boots he’s slipped on and his solid, reliable parka.

“Oh, no,” Bittle says, “good lord, who died?”

“No one yet.” Kent pulls the phone away from his ear and angles the screen into the mailbox: nothing. It’s empty. “What’s up?”

“None of your business, Kent, lord in heaven, don’t scare me like that.”

“Sorry.”

Kent can picture him sitting in the garden behind his house, drinking something (sweet tea, sweet tea with bourbon) and flipping through a cookbook, or trolling for guys on some app. Or maybe he’s seeing someone; the truth is, Kent has no clue what Bittle does with his time now that Greer is away, and now that she is a sophomore Kent has invested over a year into trying to figure it out, and he has not. Bitty shares an awful lot of himself publicly whilst managing to keep a tight lid on anything Kent might want to know: how he keeps Jack forever marginally invested, why he bothers if he’s so disinterested, how he’s freed himself of any burden of caring what Jack thinks of him, who and when and how he manages to fuck. Seems like a beautiful life.

Bittle asks, “Well?”

And Kent says, “Oh, I was just—” The truth is, he was just calling to tell Bittle that his daughter needs an abortion, though probably not in so many words. More like, “Have you spoken to her lately? She called me—I promised I wouldn’t tell.” That kind of leading; Kent is a natural at it.

But for whatever reason, either because his muscles are suffering around his metal joint, or because he doesn’t want any trouble, he just asks, “How’s Greer?”

“She’s fine,” Bitty says slowly. “I’ll tell her to call her dad more often, if that’s what you want. I know the e-mails aren’t cutting it.”

“That would be nice,” Kent agrees, suddenly curious.

“He doesn’t have to text me eight times a day about it, I mean, the poor girl’s in college, let her live.”

“I’ll tell him that.”

“Like I know Jack talked to his parents a lot, but he’d been through a bunch of stuff and, you know, I don’t have to tell you, it was probably justified worrying. I talked to my parents a lot, but I don’t know if that was healthy, either. Actually, tell you what, when you go talk to Jack, why don’t you tell him he needs a hobby?”

“Because he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Bittle actually laughs. “I know,” he says.

Kent sighs, and he sees it in the cold air.

“Greer is perfectly fine,” Bittle says. “I would know if she weren’t. At least y’all are in the same time zone. I think about her getting out of class while I’m just sitting down to lunch, isn’t that a weird thought?”

No, not really. “Yeah, I guess,” Kent agrees. “Well, I’ll tell Jack you said she’s fine.”

“Tell him not to worry. I mean, it’s like telling a brick wall not to worry, but she is fine. Things just work themselves out.”

“Very zen.”

“Magical West Coast thinking, if you know what I mean.”

“Does the Western _conference_ count?”

“I don’t know,” Bitty says, “but you take care of yourself.” He hangs up.

The cold is punishing. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Kent calls Greer. His fingers are absolutely freezing. He wonders if Jack has realized he’s not in the house. Probably not.

“You asshole,” Greer says. “I’ve been texting you.”

“I had stuff to do.” It’s true. What does he owe her? He pities her, but he can’t say he owes her. “So, look. I’m not going to cancel my plans. Move the appointment back a week, and I’ll go down to Poughkeepsie.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, Kenny, come down this weekend.”

He’s so fucking cold, it’s unbearable. He starts to trudge back to the house, and he feels every step in his goddamn hip. “No, you listen to me. You’re asking me to do you a favor. I’m going to do it. But you can’t just demand I cancel my life to accommodate you. You’re a goddamn grown-up woman, you don’t have to get me to drag your ass to an abortion clinic, and pay for it, all on your schedule.”

“You’re good for the money!”

“It’s not about the money! You don’t get to make people do what you want them to do when you want them to do it, though, _sweetie_ , maybe your dad didn’t teach you that. Or maybe he did and you just think you can boss me around, well, you can’t. I’ll get you your damn abortion, but you have to reschedule it, because I’m going to Quebec City with your father, okay? That’s this weekend. If you want me to help you, reschedule.”

“But Kenny,” she cries.

He pauses in front of the door to the house. For a split second, he considers ringing the bell, and then he remembers, shit, I live here. “Don’t ‘Kenny’ me, okay? Just—just do what you have to do. And if you don’t want to come off as suspicious, shoot Jack a text or something, because he’s worried about you, and I’m damn well not going to tell him, guess what, he should be, and I know you don’t want him to have a stroke and keel over and die. His blood pressure’s insane, and he’s got a panic disorder, for fuck’s sake. So text him, please, Greer, thank you, and let me know if I should plan to drive down to New York, okay?”

She’s still crying: “You’re such a bitch.” It’s unlike her. She is, historically, unlike her parents, not a crier.

There are dozens of things Kent could say: “It runs in the family.” “I’m not the only one.” “Well, sweetie, look in the mirror.”

Instead, Kent just says, “Yep.” And he hangs up the phone.

* * *

Nighttime is a little of this and a little of that. They play with the cats, first with the treat maze and then with the laser pointer. Shame on anyone, Kent thinks, who believes that cats don’t have personalities. The way these three work together to hunt prey—the red dot that Jack flicks methodically around the den—would scare the living daylights out of Kent, if he didn’t know cats were capable of love. The only person he’s ever met who agrees strongly is his mother. His sister, on the other hand, is a doubter.

“ _I_ love them anyway,” she’ll say, to make the point that the value of something shouldn’t be how it feels about you, but rather, how you feel about it.

Now that Kent is beyond fifty, and Brigid is almost there, the question of whether he’ll have children has finally died off for good. He can admit now, many years beyond his own delusions, that when he’d first gotten back together with Jack, and perhaps for several years after, any time he climbed onto an elliptical, he would bathe himself in the comfort of fantasizing that he could have a baby with Jack, and Brigid could carry it. It was a safe thing to allow himself because it never had any potential to come true. This was before Greer was old enough to have a personality, good or bad, for Kent to brush up against. Instead, she was curly haired and babbling, sallow-skinned like Jack and big-eyed like all of Bittle’s relatives on his mother’s side, one of whom was Greer’s mother, in deed if not legality.

Going over the events of the day, and mostly his two calls with Greer, all Kent can really think to himself is, thank god.

Cats do everything right, he tells himself, curled against Jack’s chest as he flicks the laser pointer from the carpet to the window sill to the TV stand.

“It’s like they’re chasing a puck,” Jack once observed, and yes, a little bit. Just slightly. You can spay a cat, Kent thinks to himself. A cat will always be smaller than you are. You’ll always be able to carry it in your arms. Oh, sure, it might want to leave the room, or sit on someone else’s lap. But as soon as they can’t get you to act affronted, they turn needy again.

“That’s enough with the laser,” Kent says, grasping Jack’s wrist. He’s been keeping one eye on the clock; they’re not supposed to go at it for more than twenty minutes.

And, well, same with Kent and Jack, frankly. They dress slowly for bed, maneuvering around one another without thinking. There’s an intimacy, Kent has learned, to how well they avoid one another. Someone ducks into the closet to grab pajama pants while the other stands in front of the mirror and flosses. They used to have such arguments when Kent would stay up late and Jack would want him to come to bed early. Now Kent just heads straight for the bedroom when Jack does, and he tells himself Jack wants him there. He knows it’s that Jack can’t stand being awakened by the door cracking, or cats running in, or light from the bathroom pouring out across the bed, or the mattress shifting. Kent still wonders, sometimes, if Bittle was compliant, or if he had the will to go to bed lonely, if necessary. Probably the latter, Kent thinks. After all, they got divorced.

The cats have long since stopped trying to get in by scratching the door. So it’s silent, mostly, except for the pages of Jack’s book rustling, and the floorboards creaking under Kent’s feet when he slides under the covers. He drapes an arm over Jack’s chest, kisses the cotton that stretches over Jack’s shoulder, and asks, “Voulez-vous?”

Jack closes the book on his fingers, yawns, and says, “I have a headache.”

“Again?”

“Still.” The book opens again.

“Jeez.” Kent sits up. “Maybe you shouldn’t read. Maybe it’s eye strain.”

Jack has no response to that.

“Well, maybe you oughta go to an optometrist, get your eyes checked out.” When Jack says nothing, Kent adds, “You’re an old man. Maybe you need bifocals.”

“I can see just fine.”

“Maybe it’s arrhythmia.”

“You mean astigmatism.” Jack closes the book again with finality, tucking the jacket flap into the pages and setting it aside. “And I can see just fine.”

Kent may not have a college degree, but the irony hangs so low that he can see it dangling in front of him.

At least Jack can read the concern on Kent’s face, and doesn’t ignore it. “My mother’s had chronic headaches my whole life. I mean, her whole life. Migraines. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re having migraines?”

“No. It’s not that bad. I can live with some pain, eh?” He turns to French: “And so can you. Turn the light out.”

They curl up together, or Jack curls away from Kent, the bow of Jack’s back as curved as a cat’s. His shirt hikes up, and Kent binds himself against it, winding his fingers into the scant hair that grows on Jack’s stomach and pressing his lips to the back of Jack’s neck. He likes to be held, and Kent knows he likes the concern. They have lived like this, together in this goofy house, for many years. But the novelty has never worn off, for Kent; he will never grow tired of Jack’s soft snoring, or how the wind blows into their window and Kent can hear it disturbing the shingles. Because it’s autumn dead leaves come dislodged and fall into their window boxes.

Kent grew up on a busy street in Syracuse, in a bedroom he shared with his sister in an apartment in a complex off a main road. He’ll always miss that, no matter how old he gets. Most of his life was spent in Vegas, in a well-appointed box in a well-appointed tower. It was noiseless, but he had Purrs to chirp against his ear, so sometimes Kent could hear it in his dreams. Now it’s Jack and the autumn weather, and unlike every previous stage of his life, Kent has no clue if anything’s coming next. This might be it, and he’s trying to be fine with that.

* * *

Before, Kent would have had no qualms about asking Jack’s parents to cat-sit. But Bob and Alicia are old now, and so Kent worries. Could either of them retrieve a writhing creature from behind the washing machine? Or, even more basic: could they handle brisk play with three long-haired cats? Would they brush them? Would they stoop over to inspect the cleanliness of the water bowls? Jack thinks it’s foolish to hire Ceci from down the road, but Kent will never be old enough, or rich enough, to forget his boyhood of kind luck from local patrons, nor will he ever think it useless to maintain the integrity of his pets: their shiny coats, their clear eyes, their clean teeth. If he comes home and there are scratches in the legs of his Danish oiled walnut dining room table, he’ll know Ceci didn’t work out.

“But it’s one weekend, and they’re cats,” Jack says, carrying their bags out to the garage. “If you put out kibble they’ll be fine.”

As if they haven’t had this conversation before. “Kibble?”

“Yes. Cat food.”

“My cats do not eat kibble,” Kent explains, for what is neither the first nor the last time. It would be wrong to say that Jack doesn’t care; maybe he just doesn’t understand. Kent sometimes wonders whether it’s odd to live with someone for so many years, to know them for so long, and yet so incompletely comprehend them.

It isn’t exactly a long ride. If Kent drives to Quebec City alone, he goes out of his way to drive alongside the river. Jack isn’t doing this for sightseeing, however, and so Kent dispenses with the idea of any scenic route. He won the argument about which car to take; it had to have been worth it, because he would resent even three hours, or just shy, behind the wheel of Jack’s truck. They should outlaw those things, Kent thinks to himself; they handle like shit and barely accelerate, lugging all that machinery behind them, the truck bed. It’s excessive.

The drive is quiet, at least, Jack having put on some station he likes and Kent refusing to disallow it. It’s pure pleasure for him, driving a roadster. He misses the desert when he drives; those empty roads always felt freshly paved—because no one drove on them, and because the weather was forgiving. Jack mumbles little things over the music about the Q this season, which boys they’re going to see play. It’s difficult not to think, even half-distracted by the task of physically driving, of what Kent might have made in his youth of older men discussing him before a game. Probably something like, well, if that’s how creepy gays are, count me out. He doesn’t point this out to Jack.

Perhaps some of his detached mood is owed to the fact that he hasn’t heard from Greer all week. If she were dead, or something, he figures, Bittle would have told them. Maybe the school would have called Jack. Kent’s got no clue how it works at college. Is it illegal to have an abortion when you’re in college? If you’re under twenty-one? It must depend on the state, Kent figures. Who watches the kids—professors? Are there, like, camp counselors? Do colleges have that? It’s humiliating to consider that he has no idea how college even works in that sense. He obviously knows that Jack lived in that house for three years, and he remembers it crammed with bodies, mostly the bodies of young people not being exactly as law-abiding as kids might be. Of course Jack had been a legal adult when he _began_ college. Did he ever feel odd surrounded by people much younger?

And, well, Kent figures—he married Bittle, so, probably not.

Who knows what Greer does, Kent thinks. Anyone could have gotten her pregnant. She’ll never tell him. She may not even text him again. He’s made a reservation at a hotel in Poughkeepsie, across the Hudson. She’ll need somewhere to go after the procedure, if she goes through with it. If she hadn’t done it already. He remembers helping his sister through the aftermath of her abortion; she was ultimately fine, cracking jokes while she bled through her panties. But Greer is a Bittle, so she doesn’t make jokes. God, he hopes she’s okay. His hands clench the wheel, resenting proactively the idea that she’d embroil him in this and then abandon him. And wouldn’t that be one of the most Jack-like things?

* * *

After a lifetime of hotels Kent might be sick of them, but he isn’t—he never could be. He’s at home with homelessness, with being rootless. He ought to hate them; the darkest, most anonymous moments of his hard times were all had in and around hotel rooms, but at least that was consistent. One of the many divergences that took his attention mostly away from professional hockey upon retirement was the fact that no matter how good he was at it, and no matter how much fun it was to play, it had been a life of instability. Hotel rooms, year after year, smelled the same, even if clinical; had similar layouts, even if cramped; and the same rituals unfolded once over the threshold: pick a side of the bed, flip through the room service menu, read the labels on the free toiletries in the bathroom. With Jack, Kent knows what side he’ll be on, but it’s always a surprise which of them will get the “good” side, based on how the room is oriented. Jack gets the good side this time, but it’s only two nights.

Kent kisses Jack when the door is closed, stretching his arms around Jack’s shoulders.

Jack mumbles, “I have to put the bag down,” but he leans into it.

Reaching low, Kent is surprised enough at what he finds that he blurts out, “Oh my god, are you _hard_ for _hockey_?”

There’s a laundry list of things for Kent to be sad about, and perhaps the top entry should be the fact that Jack doesn’t deny it.

  
“Well,” Kent says, letting go, “good enough, close enough.”

“Actually, I, uh. Thought about it on the way up here.”

“It?”

“You,” Jack clarified. “Or, this.”

Kent casts his eyes toward the clock. It’s no time to get something elaborate started; the game is in the afternoon, and they haven’t eaten, and the fact is that sex between them—real sex, clothes off and all—is such a time-consuming activity that it’s impossible to enter into it without real planning, and at least an hour. They don’t have an hour, so Kent says, “Suck my dick.”

If, when they had been younger, Kent had known that many—indeed, perhaps most—problems could have been resolved by simply commanding Jack to blow him, well. Kent’s life would have gone a lot differently, maybe.

Jack isn’t exactly an enthusiastic cocksucker, though he is a serious one. It’s an activity with a clear marker of success at the end, a prize so to speak, and Jack does well with interactions he can win. There’s another likely mark against Jack’s having enjoyed sex with women: when it’s over, how do you tally up how well you did? Jack has never been able to take people’s praise at face value.

In Kent’s experience women aren’t always so forthcoming with praise, anyhow.

If nothing else, Jack can easily mimic generosity through intensity. Nobody else has ever given Kent Parson a blow job, so it’s not like he can compare what Jack’s offering. On the other hand, there’s a cruel efficiency to Jack’s ministrations that gets Kent off, sure, but then he feels rather hollow about it, like the love wasn’t there, or something. Even mid-suck he can tell himself that’s a stupid way to think about it, but Jack sucks dick like he measures out ounces of frozen pellets for their cats, or wraps Christmas presents. Or, for that matter, like, he takes photographs with a nice camera: there’s a proficiency and determination there that lacks a soul Jack can never reach in and pull through, and it’s unclear whether he knows he’s lacking in it. Anyway, Kent tugs at Jack’s hair until Jack goes deep, stabs his fingers into Kent’s perineum, and swallows everything. Kent checks the clock: six minutes, which, not bad.

“Are you hungry?” Jack asks. He stoops by the mirror near the closet, not having bothered to get up off of his knees, and brushes the handfuls out of his hair.

Kent goes into the bathroom and returns with a damp washcloth. “Yeah, let’s eat something.”

“I could go for a steak.” There’s no reply for that, because they have a reservation at a steakhouse that night, and Jack always wants steak. “I’m on vacation,” he whines in the elevator. Kent continues to say nothing, and privately fears for Jack’s health. Lacking any excellent, better option, they simply land in the lobby for afternoon tea.

Kent appreciates rituals. He has a glass of champagne because why not? They’re on vacation. By the same logic, Jack appears to have decided not to worry about his diet, and slathers clotted cream all over everything right before he puts it in his mouth. Kent can feel himself straining to not say anything; he really should, though, is the thing. Instead, he relocates to the banquette so he can sit by Jack’s side and show him the pictures Ceci has sent of the cats. Hazel is curled up on the bed, where she blends in with the rest of the pillows.

“She misses us,” Kent gasps, like they didn’t leave that morning.

“She misses you,” Jack says, and he sticks his knife back into the pot of clotted cream. “She’s on your side of the bed.”

“It’s not like scents are relegated to just one side,” Kent reasons, though he is also, secretly, thrilled.

Jack sniffs, “I guess,” and redirects his attention to the finger sandwiches on the tiered tray before them. The cucumber has been laid open-face in neat scales, and fastened to the crustless rye with salted butter. Kent watches as Jack inspects the sandwich, which he balances on his fingers like a fledgling or an infant’s grasp, or something else he could very easily crush. Kent wants so badly to do more than just sit aside Jack on the same plush banquette in a hotel lobby; he would take Jack’s hand or feed him sandwiches, or bury his face in Jack’s arm and sigh, let the tips of his fingers lap at the under-curl of Jack’s overgrown hair. Instead, he feels Jack’s warmth along his side and that’s it—except for the warmth from his phone as he looks over every message from Ceci.

“Is it supposed to clump like this?” she asks, because she is a moron.

“OUI,” Kent tells her, in all caps. He takes a deep breath, spares a glance at Jack as he plows through sandwiches, and adds, his fingers fumbling over the French, “It’s supposed to clump like that.” Then: “Make sure you get every box.”

Three cats and four boxes in a big, empty house. He’ll give Ceci a thousand bucks when he gets home. He can hear his mother in the back of his mind, saying, “Don’t throw your money away.” She would keel over if she knew how much Kent intends to leave for the maids here after two nights and two mornings. Then again, it’s been a while since he got Jack in him good and deep. He appreciates discretion as much as the next guy. Jack is surprisingly stingy, but he has an heir to worry about. The barren loins of the Parson siblings have engendered nothing to continue worrying about. He ought to think about setting up some bequests in earnest. And in the meantime, there’s no reason not to spread it around.

Other people—staff, tea-takers, hotel guests circuiting through the lobby on their way back from morning meetings, changing for a late lunch—notice them in the corner. It’s long stares, usually. Kent can pick apart the “holy shit” realizations from the ones that signal some confusion; pop culture has glutted Kent’s mind to the point that he can tell when he knows he knows a face, but doesn’t know whose face it is. He also knows that staring doesn’t help. Plus it’s the best hotel in the city, a veritable icon, and so it’s not like finding some former Disney Channel hero in the steam room of a bathhouse—which is something that has happened to Kent, and he only ever ventured into one of those things that one time, miserable in Columbus, having been routed and just wanting to get away. He didn’t manage to get up to anything, and certainly not with that guy, and to this day he’s only 80 percent sure it was him. So it’s not like that—random. Probably a lot of formerly important hockey players end up slowly sipping Roederer at some table here.

Finally, someone ventures over, and a few minutes later someone else. Jack has the media personality of a kid just out of college interviewing for his first job at a hedge fund: yes, no, thanks, brief laugh, agreeable. He’ll sign anything. Kent, on the other hand, knows he had moods: he can be sweet to fans, funny, oozing charm—or just distracted. Jack’s professional is neutral, whereas to Kent, professional has always meant charisma. Maybe they temper each other.

“Would you guys sign my hat?” a little boy asks.

They turn to one another, slowly, because he’s a little boy, but it’s a Habs hat.

He’s taken it off of his head and is holding it in trembling hands.

“I rooted for the Habs when I was a kid,” Jack says, in French. He reaches out and takes the hat. “Are you watching this season?”

“Every game!”

Jack grins at that. “Me too.”

Kent hands him a pen.

“Do you watch with your dad?”

“No, my mother. My dad is from Florida. He doesn’t care about hockey.”

Jack laughs. “They have hockey in Florida.” He’s smearing the J and the Z across the brim. “Don’t they, Parse?”

He lost a Cup there once. “Yeah,” Kent says. “They sure do.” He takes the hat, studying it. Kent doesn’t want his name anywhere near the Canadiens logo. He doesn’t want it any smaller or larger than Jack’s sloppy signature. From the moment he entered the 2009 NHL draft, Kent has signed his name over and over again. It’s as familiar to him as his mother’s face, or Jack’s voice, or the view of Lake Brome from the kitchen table—that is, something that’s so close to him he barely recognizes it at all. The important part is to get the big K and the big P, and the little 90 below it. He could write whatever he wanted in between the K and the P and no one would give a shit. He would write “fuck you” and no one would notice. It’s not like the “ent arson” is legible anyway. He grins at this floppy-haired, nervous boy, and hands his hat back.

But before Kent can think of something to say, Jack inquires, “Do you play?”

“Non,” he says, just staring at his hat. “It’s dangerous.”

“It is,” Jack agrees. “My daughter, she never played. My husband, my ex-husband, didn’t want her to play. He worried she’d get a concussion, but they’re not as common in youth leagues these days, especially with no-contact, and they live in Los Angeles, or they lived in Los Angeles, because my daughter is in college now. He had her riding horses, and then she was good at skating so she switched to ice dancing. I told him she could fall off a horse, but no one listens to me. What do you play?”

The boy looks up. “I don’t play anything.”

“You don’t play anything.”

“No. I just like to watch.”

Frowning, Jack doesn’t approve. “You’ll find what you like some day.”

Kent adds, “Or don’t, whatever. Don’t let Jack pressure you.”

“I have to go,” says the boy. “Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman. Mr. Parson.” It’s the first hint that he knows exactly who he’s been talking to, rather than just—hockey players.

“Any time,” Jack says.

Kent supposes it’s not so difficult to spot them; there are precious few male couples of superstar athletes a person might run into.

* * *

“Don’t forget to bring a Viagra with you,” Kent has to remind Jack eight times before they leave the hotel room.

“Why?” is Jack’s response.

There’s little Kent can imagine Jack not understanding about why. But, to be annoying, he says, “Because we’re not coming back here between the game and dinner, and I want you to fuck me.”

“Oh,” is all Jack manages. He’s a capable service top, or whatever.

Or he used to be, anyway. In the elevator, Kent asks, “Did you, um, bring it?” There’s a woman in there with them.

“Bring what?”

Kent’s eyes dart to Jack’s crotch. “You know.”

“Oh.” The elevator doors open up on the lobby; the lady gets out and Jack attempts to follow. So Kent grabs him by the wrist, and he hangs back, saying sheepishly, “I forgot it.”

So they go back upstairs and Jack slides the pill bottle into his jacket pocket. It’s not very good service, is it, forgetting like that? But they’re now running late, so Kent has no time to make a sexy little to-do out of it.

* * *

The game goes on seemingly forever, to the extent that Kent begins to worry they’ll miss their dinner reservation. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, really, but changed plans and social conundrums are a bad combination for Jack. The real complication is that he wants to go into the Oceanic locker room after the game and—what? Kent doesn’t wholly get the desire. An old teammate of theirs, a guy whose final season was their first on the team, is an assistant coach, and Jack has already made arrangements to go back there. He wants to talk to the boys, or just look around, maybe, inspect everything. Kent misses the locker room like Jack does, but it would be wrong to say he misses locker rooms, plural. Kent misses _his_ locker room, the one he built up for the Aces over many years of captaining. The visitor dressing stalls don’t call out to him, really. But, Jack…

Jack is embarrassing, sometimes. They go to games, sure—Bob has seats he rarely occupies behind the bench at the new Bell Center, and Kent likes watching hockey. But now they’re at this game, being played by gamine boys, and Jack will not shut up about them.

“That’s a big boy,” Jack gushes, like he wants to fuck the third-line right wing. “See him? He’s built like an enforcer, but he’s got speed—good wrists on the center. But that boy, you see him? Number twenty—he’s got thighs, Parse. Just flying there. It’s those thighs.”

“I have thighs.”

Jack rests his hand on one, but doesn’t say anything to Kent, just keeps talking about hockey, or about boys playing hockey, if not the boys themselves: “I like seventy-eight on the Remparts, too. Don’t know much about him. Good stick-handling. Look at those hands. Oh man, they’re gunning for him, but they’re not gonna catch up—that’s a lucky break. You think he’s a second year? He’s gotta be older. That’s a lot of finesse for a guy’s first year in juniors.”

“I don’t know, Zimms.” Some sick feeling is settled in Kent’s stomach: these boys are _so young_. How can Jack talk about their thighs—what’s he been looking at? Kent can’t see any body parts under those shorts. They’re just kids, jesus.

Just kids, he thinks. He wants to crawl under the seat.

Number twenty on the Oceanic gets his hip into some other guy, and that kid gets slammed into the boards. Kent’s entire body hurts, instinctively.

Jack’s pupils are swimming pools, veritable black holes. “He’s focused,” Jack drools. “Ah, look at his footwork. He’s on that puck, he’s got _control_ —”

So many mean thoughts come to Kent, and then he reconsiders: this game is a bad time for that. Instead, he goes with: “If you like number twenty so much, why don’t you marry him?”

Icing, and Jack lets go of Kent’s thigh. The refs are skating over for the face-off.

Jack mutters, “I forgot they changed the rules.” He’s staring at the ice, an unknowable look on his features.

“Yeah, two seasons ago,” Kent says, because he certainly hadn’t forgotten, and just to supply some noise, so that Jack doesn’t think he’s angry. He isn’t _angry_ —it’s something else. He’s not sure what.

“Why do you think they did that?”

It’s hard to say if Jack is kidding, or if he’s chirping, or if he really has forgotten. Kent has been working tirelessly, if not nonstop, for years now, to reform this sport. He wants to see more stoppages in play, more chances for players to catch their breaths. His heart aches for every boy on the rink right now: he hopes they all at least consider college. He hopes they go into the rest of their lives with strong bones and intact teeth.

“It’s safer,” Kent says.

“Right,” Jack agrees. “Yeah, right.”

“Rub my hip?”

“Oh.” Jack turns away from the ice for a moment, so long as the puck hasn’t been dropped yet. “Hurting?”

“No more than usual.”

Jack obliges, and the puck falls to the ice. Quebec gets it and Twenty nimbly skates around the D-man in his way. He doesn’t say much, pressing his knuckles into and across the joint of Kent’s fake hip. Announcements in French fill the arena, and only a few spectators stare at them, everyone else watching the match. It’s almost like being normal, Kent thinks. He rests his head against Jack’s shoulder, and follows the action across the ice, back and forth, for the rest of the period. Part of him wants to be down there, with gear on, tearing around with the rest of them.

A different part wants to run out of this arena, and never step foot in another one.

* * *

Kent loves hockey like he loves his mother: an essential ingredient for his being, a _sine qua non_ , the root of his self and the root of all his troubles. When he was younger he needed it, but he’s older now, and when he thinks of it, he gets the urge to undo it in his own mind, to free himself of all that. It explains everything. It ruined everything. The lord giveth and the lord taketh. It’s cold in here, and so under his jeans, Kent’s hip aches and burns. 

At least it’s never going to get worse, he thinks. At least it’s only in the cold. At least he can exercise it like normal; he could skate on it, if he wanted. Does he want to? Well, maybe—he did last Christmas morning, and he remembers laughing himself stupid, grabbing Jack by the waist, pulling that big ass against him and saying, “What’d you get me? This my present?”

Jack had said, “No, I got you a real gift, why, should I give it back? You want this instead?”

The real gift had turned out to be a trip to Antibes, which they’d taken over March. That was, fuck, almost a year ago, that Christmas. Maybe that’s the longest Kent’s ever gone without skates on his feet. He tells himself that was a long time ago. Doesn’t feel it, but, fuck, a year is a long time, right?

Kent has never really understood why, when he looks back on things with Jack, he was happy, and they were laughing, and everything was okay. Good, even. Perfect, on occasion. If things had been that good, he would have known it at the time, right? Will he look back on this game and think it was good? Will he remember afternoon tea being good? All he can think about is how it’s evening and Greer hasn’t so much as texted him all week. Is she okay?

Why hasn’t she fucking texted him, that little shit?

* * *

The Remparts’ visitor locker room is quite a bit nicer than Kent remembers. Then again, it’s been thirty-five years. Devin meets them with open arms and a huge grin, camera crew in tow. Kent knows to mug at the cameras, to pull the brim of his hat behind his head, and to let go of Jack’s hand and strut over like he just won the game himself.

Devin shouts, “Just like old times, eh?” He’s from the Maritimes—a real solid guy. In middle age he’s become more barrel-chested and is thicker around the middle than Jack. He grabs Kent by the hands and adds, “We’re going all the way this year, Parser.”

Kent doesn’t mention that Devin left Rimouski the year _before_ Kent and Jack led the team to the Memorial Cup, or that the odds on any given team in the CHL going _all the way_ are pretty poor this early in the season. Since Kent is being filmed, he beams and wraps his arm around Devin’s back, thumping him a few times and saying, “Quebec didn’t know what hit ’em.”

“Aren’t you a Quebec boy now?” Devin asks. He steps back and points at Kent’s hat. “What is this, is this vintage?” He takes it off of Kent’s head, and all of Kent’s stupid hair flops forward, at least, where it hasn’t receded. “Oh, yeah, this is some old-time gear right here.” He puts it on his own head. “Whaddaya think?”

“Keep it,” Kent says, because what he thinks is that he doesn’t want Devin’s Rogaine getting all over his precious 2009 Memorial Cup Champions hat.

Still, he understands the publicity aspect of all of this: the franchise is proud of its successful spawn, as they should be, and Jack can’t expect to get the access he apparently craves without donating a little face time for the promo stuff. Their story is, at this point, pretty valuable: the team brought them together, they went off to the NHL and achieved great personal success separately, only to reunite. Kent is sure that story’s sold at least a couple of tickets. It’s not a full story, but it’s close enough. It glosses over some real shit, but the skeleton looks human on its own, no flesh necessary.

For everyone to whom he’s introduced, Kent has the same question: what are your plans after the Q? Thinking about college?

It can be hard to get all the nuance when these tired boys give him bullshit in French: “You can’t play in the NCAA after the Q,” says one, a short brunet whose undercut is growing back into the shape of the Canadian flag. He’s pulling off his pads, trying not to seem out-of-breath, though most of these guys are; sixty minutes of play, or thereabouts, will do that to a kid.

“You can get an appeal through the athletic department at your college,” Kent explains. “Jack did it.” He glances to the other side of the locker room, where Jack has cornered number twenty.

“I’m not going to college.” This boy seems so pathetically green, such a teenager: “I’m going into the draft.”

“What if you’re not drafted?” Kent asks.

“I’ll go play in Europe for a year or two and come back as an unrestricted free agent.”

“I dunno,” Kent presses. “The league is always waiting. You can always do some intramural—a lot of good schools have D-III.”

“Thanks,” Kent is told. “I’ll think about it.”

He has this conversation, some version of it, with three kids before he’s asked, “But you didn’t go to college?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Kent admits.

This kid is a redhead with muddy brown eyes. He looks sad, until he gives Kent one of the evilest smirks Kent has seen in a while. “I’ll think about it,” he says, and it sounds like a taunt. He pauses for a moment. Then: “Okay, I thought about it. No thanks.”

“Well,” Kent says, “thanks for considering it.” All of this has been filmed.

Clear across the dressing room, Jack hasn’t left his mark alone for a second. They’ve been talking for so long, or Jack has, that the poor boy isn’t even out of his skates. The kid, number twenty—or, as the bag wedged next to him says, Cyr-Tremblay—is the sort of boy Kent might have fallen for when he was younger: big lips, too much hair, and, since his jersey and pads are off, Kent can see that he has a broad chest. (Still in his shorts though, so Kent can’t speak to his thighs.) He’s blond, and red in the face from three periods of play. Yet even as Kent can see the kid is attractive, it’s in this very teenaged way: sort of goofy, or try-hard, or self-consciously overdeveloped. Kent can’t help but think of Jack in juniors, with his mop of dark brown hair, and the woozy confidence that came and went with his mental and emotional equilibrium. Not that this Cyr-Tremblay kid has emotional problems.

Or, well, he probably does; it’s more likely that any given kid on this team has emotional problems than it is that they’ll go all the way like Devin hopes.

Kent puts one hand on Jack’s shoulder and offers his other to the kid: “Kent Parson,” he says, like there’s any chance in hell that’s necessary. He tries French: “I hope Jack’s not talking your ear off.”

Sheepishly, the kid touches the sides of his head. “They seem attached still,” he replies, in English, before taking Kent’s hand, finally. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mister Parson.”

“There’s that media training,” says Kent. “ ‘Parse’ is fine, or ‘Kent,’ either way.”

“Coach said you were coming to the game, but he didn’t say you were coming into the locker room.”

“Jack can’t resist a good locker room,” Kent says, because he has to make this interaction as normal as possible. “We’re not keeping you from changing, are we?” There’s a cameraman a few feet away, and Devin is standing there nodding like an idiot.

“Louis”—it’s pronounced in the English manner—“came to us from Truro,” Devin tells them. “He’s got more GTGs than anyone in the Q right now.”

Jack grabs Kent’s hand, the one that’s still resting on his shoulder. “That’s impressive,” he says. “How’s your average play time?”

“Per game? Uh—”

“Babe,” Kent says, pointedly, hoping _to god_ that if he makes it weird they won’t use any of this. “This kid doesn’t even have his skates off yet.”

“It’s okay,” says Louis Cyr-Tremblay.

“Your feet are probably swollen up like dumplings.”

Louis laughs, but it’s awkward. “Not quite.”

“Plus we should get to dinner.”

“I suppose,” Jack says. “But, please e-mail me. Can I give you my number? Or, my e-mail? I probably have a card or something.”

“The team can get you his information,” Devin offers.

And this kid’s face falls, like, Kent gets it: he’s exhausted, he’s already hyped up on adrenaline from scoring that goal to tie it up, a legendary hockey player has kept him from getting his gear off for half an hour, and no one’s so much as asked him if he wants to be Jack’s pen pal. But, surely, from their conversation, Louis can tell that he is going to be _written to_ , and that he’d damn well better write back.

Still, the kid’s a trooper, and he puts on a smile. “Yeah,” he says, his voice deep with just an edge of pubertal whine. “That’d be great, man. Thanks.”

Smiling, Jack nods and says, “I look forward to it. I wish my daughter would e-mail me more.”

“That’s rough,” says Louis.

“She’s a sophomore in college,” Kent says, to the camera and, vaguely, to Devin. “I’m sure she’s got more important things to do, you know, various things going on.”

“It was nice to meet you guys,” Louis says, with an air of finality. “Thanks for coming out tonight, uh. This afternoon.” He bends over, and begins to unlace his skates.

* * *

They do not discuss what just happened on the way out of the locker room, and through the bowels of the stadium. Devin walks them out quietly, the camera trailing behind, perhaps looking for a concluding shot to whatever little promo video this jaunt was going to inspire. Kent is confident that any footage acquired is unusable.

“You want to come to dinner?” Kent asks, knowing very well that Devin will have to decline.

“Bus leaves in an hour,” he says, sounding disappointed. “It’s straight back to Rimouski.”

“No overnight?” Jack asks. “No team dinner?”

“We’ve got sandwiches for the bus,” Devin explains. “Some of the boys have a test on Monday. Probably better to just get back, right, not let ’em get up to a bunch of stuff like we’d’ve done.”

“Ah, that’s a shame, eh? I loved those team dinners.”

“No you didn’t, Zimms.”

“The dinner part, I did.”

“You’re just hungry,” Kent says. For Devin’s sake, he clarifies: “We’re going out to dinner.”

“You said. What’s on the menu?”

“A giant steak. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.” Jack nods toward Kent. “He won’t let me eat anything. I’m starving.”

“My wife lectures me,” says Devin. “Is it like that?”

“Don’t know,” Jack says. “I’ve never had a wife.”

“It blows my mind. Part of me still can’t believe that’s real.”

“What’s real?” Kent asks, thinking he means that Jack’s never had a wife.

“The two of you.” All of the exuberance and showmanship is drained from Devin’s tone, and now he seems tired, old. “I just, I never would have guessed, during juniors.”

For some reason, this comment pisses Kent off more than any. “We didn’t want anyone to guess,” he snaps. “So, good.” That definitely won’t make it into the promo cut.

“Well,” says Devin, now looking as if he wants to flee—understandable. “You boys should come out to more games. Come up to Rimouski.”

“Boys,” Kent echoes.

“I’d like to,” Jack says. “Have to check the schedule.”

“Thanks for this.”

“No, thank you guys for coming.”

“Good win,” says Jack. “Exciting year for this bunch ahead.”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” says Devin, before he turns to head back to the locker room.

* * *

It doesn’t make sense to have dinner before sex, really. It should be the other way around—fucking, then dinner. On the most basic level, it makes sense to work up an appetite. It’s so old-school, Kent thinks, scanning the wine list. You had to demonstrate that you had the resources to feed a girl before she’d put out for you, or something. Ironically, it was sort of like that, before; in juniors, Kent had a tiny stipend, and Jack, well, Jack never had to worry about that.

“You want to split the côte du bœuf?”

Kent looks up from the wine list, losing his place; fuck it, he knows he’s going to get a glass of champagne and call it a night. If that doesn’t get him loose, it’s a lost cause. “Sure,” he says, accepting the menu Jack’s handed to him. He can’t eat much of this, is the thing. “I’ll have a salad on the side, I guess.” They have a wedge, or a caesar prepared tableside, sliced beefsteak tomatoes with Roquefort, or a shrimp cocktail. That’s not really a salad, but Kent doesn’t own a restaurant, isn’t going to criticize.

“Pommes aligot,” Jack says, “because I haven’t had it in years. Never had it at a restaurant.”

Kent envies Bittle. To this day he has no idea what made Bittle want to leave. He’s got his hunches, but they’ll go forever unconfirmed. He knows what makes Jack tough to live with—tough to love—but that’s always made Kent more determined to fight for it. Kent knows the whole dumb story about the early-morning checking clinics and how hard Bittle had to fight to stay on the college hockey team. How do you go through with all that and then, a decade later with a kid, just shrug it off like, hey, fuck it?

It was probably really easy to love Jack then, Kent thinks. It was probably really easy for Bittle to get Jack to love him back, if all he had to do was throw together pies and cheesy mashed potatoes, let Jack eat steaks and tell him how great he was.

Jack is rifling around the bread basket. “What do you think is for dessert?”

“My ass.”

When he looks up Jack has an embarrassed little smile on his face. He finds a pretzel roll and moves it to his plate, just staring at Kent with a look of half-horny judgment. “Oh yeah? That so?”

“Well, maybe,” says Kent. “Could be. Still got those pills?”

“In my pocket.” Jack reaches for the butter. He tears his roll in half.

“You won’t be thinking about dessert by the time we get there. Trust me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. What if I don’t want to eat your ass?”

“I didn’t say you had to eat it.”

“You said it was for desert, though, eh?” Jack winks, which is pointless, because he’s basically saying he doesn’t want to eat Kent’s ass, or maybe he does, or maybe because he never got a handle on being flirty in the past three decades, he isn’t sure which he wants or how to communicate it. Also, it’s weird that he would even talk about it in public, at a restaurant.

What’s certain is that he doesn’t get to pick, if they’re starting this now, which—seems it. “I’ll tell you what you get to do,” Kent says, and he slams shut the menu in his lap and sits up.

“What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to shut your mouth and look good and wait for further instruction.”

“Further instruction,” Jack says.

“Yeah, like, after dinner.”

It’s difficult not to spend the meal thinking back on their origins, their history; there was a time, of course, when Jack was young and his general social ineptitude and moodiness were precious in some way, offset by his talent and his willingness to work hard. There’s an obnoxious candle burning under him now and while the overall look of soft light, sparsely applied, is romantic, Jack has the kind of face that looks weird when lit from underneath: his cheekbones, such as they’re visible anymore, make him seem very gaunt, in a way that would be scary if Kent hadn’t seen Jack badly illuminated from just about every angle. Now he’s just this weird old dad, Kent thinks, wondering if he should eat part of a roll, or stop Jack from eating too many rolls, or ask the waiter to remove the basket of rolls. He puts one, flecked with dried onion, on his plate, and picks at it slowly until it has a big, obvious hunk missing.

Jack leans over the table, narrowly avoiding the candle, to ask, “Can I have your roll?”

“Why?”

“Because there isn’t another onion one in the basket.”

Kent sighs and hands it over.

* * *

It’s not as if Kent hasn’t thought about leaving. It’s just, where would he go? And who would he be? And how would he wake up every morning with his entire existence consumed with worry about Jack, without being able to roll over in bed and see for himself that Jack was okay, that he was there, that he was just as tall and thick and obstinate as ever? Kent doesn’t believe in love, as at least, not as this metaphysical truth that’s irrevocable because it’s impossible to quantify. Love is a series of calculations: I don’t _need_ anyone, but what I _want_ is another man to share my experience so when I look behind me I know I haven’t gone crazy. It’s sex, but it’s also sex you have to work for, and it’s convenience, but Jack is perhaps one of the least convenient people Kent has ever met in his life. Like, what a shitty person, Kent thinks, stabbing the button for their floor in the elevator on the way back from dinner. Just, if you designed a person and came up with Jack and ran him by a review board, you’d undeniably get a big fat rejection letter.

Hockey is the least useful skillset in Western culture. No one lives on ice, so the ability to skate is frivolous; hitting a small thing into a net is like, never a requirement. Using your full body to dismantle the reflexes of another man is like, fine for sex? But sex just gets harder and harder, just another series of rituals meant to keep your brain as far as possible from the knowledge that it’s going to be disappointing. Even if it’s fun, or even if it feels good, it’ll be fun and feel good for about three minutes. Kent learned that early, because he was terrified of containing the thoughts that made him feel good in the first place, let alone the actions.

Anyway, Jack is whiny about fucking: “What if I want you to fuck me?”

“I always fuck you,” Kent says, once the door is firmly shut behind them. “You have to fuck me this time.” The only way out is through: “You _have_ to.” Kent reaches for Jack’s dick, which is hard, which is a rarity, because no amount of anything gets it fully hard without medical intervention.

“Okay,” Jack agrees. He puts his hands on Kent’s shoulders and bends over to kiss him. It’s a slight stoop, not far; Kent is three inches shorter, which is only half the distance between Jack and Bittle, which he thinks might have been telling. He wonders how you even fuck someone who’s that much smaller than you are. How does it not feel like you’re fucking a child? How do you—don’t you worry about crushing him? Don’t you worry—Jack has to have worried? Jack worries about spending a few thousand dollars to replace a hot tub. He worries when his nineteen-year-old doesn’t call him every day.

Maybe he worried too much.

They end up on the bed, with Kent on top, worming his fingers into the fly on Jack’s jeans so he can get the goods out and on display. Jack’s pupils are as fat as ever, swallowing up all the blue in his eyes and making him look like a cartoon character, like a drawing of a horny person. It’s cute. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep, though his hands on Kent’s ass say otherwise, lightly pressing it like he can’t believe or doesn’t really want to admit that he can go ahead and touch the whole thing, with his whole hand.

Kent knows he has a good body, not just for a man in his mid-fifties but for anyone. It doesn’t come easily, without a lot of effort. To get abdominal definition at any age requires a ridiculously low body-fat percentage, and that kind of body-fat percentage requires control most never possess, and that’s beside the time, the money, the home gym. His trainer knows more about him than his own mother, more than Jack, more than anyone. That guy is lucky, Kent figures. He’s a good client. He does everything he’s asked and never complains.

Never one to open up, Jack doesn’t confess to liking Kent’s body, or admiring it, or envying it. He says nothing about it. The only way Kent can tell that Jack appreciates it—appreciates him—is that Jack is willing to lie underneath him, kissing his face and kneading his ass, Jack’s artificially hard cock trapped between a well-defined stomach and a soft one. As a kid—as a young man—when they hooked up again in their thirties, even—Kent would have looked down on himself, thought his standards pretty low, wondered how he would ever get turned on by the body of a man gone so thoroughly to seed. But when they met, Jack was a thick boy with thirty pounds on Kent—just, more of that was muscle. They never talk about this, but if Jack ever gave Kent a wish, all Kent would be able to come up with would be, please don’t die on me. Please tell me you think our life together is worth living. Please show me I’m still here for a reason, any reason other than you’re too socially stunted to ask me to leave.

“I’m gonna go—” Kent says between kisses to Jack’s neck, to his jaw. “I gotta—”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees, his body going limp.

“When I come back, you’re gonna—”

“Yeah, I will.”

“If you want to eat my ass you gotta ask me,” Kent says. “You have to beg for it.”

“Maybe I don’t want it _that_ bad.”

“I dunno.” Kent grabs Jack’s balls, and squeezes.

Jack shuts his eyes, hissing. It’s a relief. He doesn’t look right when he’s turned on, like—drugs. Like he’s on drugs.

Kent stumbles into the bathroom and rifles through his bag. He doesn’t even like being fucked, is the thing. Or, well, he likes it enough. He’s neutral on it. Sometimes he likes it a lot. Mostly what he likes is making Jack do things. He wants to watch Jack exert the effort. He wants to look up into Jack’s drugged, hazy eyes and know that’s the look of him when he’s surrounded by Kent on all sides. Everywhere.

It’s a big bathroom. Good shower. Nice bath—a separate claw-foot tub. There was some World War Two conference here, and that’s what Jack likes about it. The place looks like a real goddamn castle. Kent thinks of Greer while he stares out the window at the parapets lighted for night against the river in this snowy, old-new city. It’s not an appropriate thought, given that her father’s sprawled out on the bed nakedly in the next room, probably stroking himself and looking forward to breakfast. But the castle is the thing that does it: Kent thinks of when they took her to Disney as a baby—or, okay, she was six. She cried at everything. Jack took a picture of Kent holding her in front of the castle, crying. Greer was crying—in the picture Kent has this look on his face like, really? Can you believe this shit? Her only memory of that trip is being taken to the steakhouse at the Canada pavilion, in some fake mountain or also-fake castle that looks an awful lot like the castle-hotel where Kent is defiling the bathroom with his physical and emotional melodrama. If asked, she’ll say she remembers hating that cheese soup. And she did, she really did, screaming about it until Jack had to let her eat ice cream for dinner.

Fortunately girls, even nineteen-year-olds, do so little for Kent that he’s able to shake the thought of that stupid trip by the time he’s out of the bathroom, so that he is able to refocus on the current stupid trip.

Which is good because Jack is on his knees, waiting. “Let me eat you,” he says.

Kent laughs at him, in this kind of fake way. “I didn’t say ask,” he says. “I said _beg_.”

Jack sucks Kent’s dick and whispers to it, “Please.”

“He’s not making the calls,” Kent says, the “he” in this case being, well, his dick.

“I beg to differ,” says Jack.

Kent sneers, “Keep begging.”

He’s petty, so he enjoys the sight of Jack pleading, to the extent that he knows he’ll get off on it. But he doesn’t say yes. Jack is into rimming, like, receiving it. He can’t get his head around the idea that other people aren’t.

“Fuck me,” Kent tells him. “Get your fat ass on that fucking bed and use that sad dick of yours to make me come or you’ll be sorry.”

Jack has never been sorry about anything, ever. But he’s good at following directions.

At some point in therapy, Kent conceded that this wasn’t some grand love affair. It was just two lonely guys whose sexual appetites were roughly in line with each other, with a long history and a handful of common interests—one big one—and no time to look for anything better.

“But what’s so bad about that?” Kent had asked.

His therapist had said, “Do you think there’s something bad about it?”

“No,” he’d said, and he believed it.

He still believes it.

Thanks to the pill Jack can fuck for long enough to get Kent through coming and into that heightened post-climax state where he feels every single thrust like it’s the first, like it’s new. He wipes his eyes and uses his other hand to pull Jack’s face to his, to kiss him. They don’t kiss a lot. It’s too demonstrative. Couples who kiss all the time—who needs it? Kent doesn’t get it. It’s such a weirdly intimate thing, like, sucking a man’s dick involves approximately no effort, giving up nothing of yourself. Letting him taste the inside of your mouth—that’s crazy. It’s erotic and painful. It tastes like dry-aged beef and maple-pecan ice cream with hot fudge. It tastes like the lukewarm beer they serve at major-junior hockey games. It tastes like the back of a coach bus bumping through the night while it snows outside and the wet bits of it stick of the windows. It tastes like salt because Jack cries when he comes, which isn’t something Kent taught him to do; it’s not something he did when they were kids.

Panting, Jack pulls out, wiping his sweaty hair out of his eyes, and Kent grasps his wrists. “Good boy,” he says, though Jack is the least _boy_ he’s ever been, short of breath from under ten minutes (but, Kent reminds himself, more than five) of hard fucking. Everything’s sticky; there goes the coverlet. That’s the thousand-dollar tip Kent is going to leave right there.

Jack has to say something romantic. Kent didn’t teach him that, either. “I can’t see myself being with anyone else,” he says. It’s not “I love you,” but it’s truthful. It feels correct, and it means something.

Kent will do him one better: “I could never see myself with anyone else.”

“I know,” he says. “I know, Kenny.”

“You’re so good,” Kent tells him. “You’re good for me. I’m so glad I know you.” It’s hard, but: “I love you, and I’m just—I can’t stop, Jack. I wish I could, but I just can’t.”

Jack sits up, kneels at Kent’s side. “I know, Kenny. I try.”

“I know you do.”

“I got you something,” Jack says. He gets up.

Kent follows. “I hope it’s not another cat,” he says, stumbling naked out of the bedroom and into the main parlor of their suite.

“It’s not another cat.” Jack is naked. He looks awful: swollen, sweaty, ungroomed. Kent wants to wrap him up in something and never let him see the light of day.

“Hurry up,” Kent says, looking around at all the furniture he doesn’t dare set his leaking ass upon. “I gotta like—piss or something. Put a bathrobe on.”

Jack is digging through his bag. “Here,” he says, pulling out some paper.

“Holy shit,” says Kent, because he wasn’t expecting papers. “Did you write me a poem?”

“I’m no writer,” says Jack. “No, I—it’s a marriage license.”

Leaky ass or not, Kent has to sit, immediately. He feels faint. “You want to marry me?”

“I think we should get married,” Jack says. It’s—evasive.

Kent looks up at Jack and asks, “Why?”

Jack sits, too. His cock is soft now, and damp. “Everything’s complicated,” he says.

“You’re telling me.” Kent is shocked at how quiet he sounds. “I thought you didn’t want to get married?”

“I said I didn’t want to get re-married, not that I didn’t want to get married to you.”

“Well, what the fuck kind of distinction is that?”

Jack’s fleshy body looks weird when he crosses his arms over his chest and says, “Well, it means something to me, Parse.”

“But _why_?”

Jack sighs. Jesus, he seems old, and so tired, and so—for the first time in a long while, Kent feels disgusted with him— _by_ him. “Because we have a house together. And we—what if something happens? What goes to you, and what goes to me, and what goes to Greer?”

“So this is a financial arrangement,” Kent says, a note of realization he’s sounding out loud.

“All marriages are,” Jack says.

“I’m sure when you married Bittle, you thought of it as a financial arrangement.”

Of course, that pisses him off. “It was a financial arrangement.” Jack digs his heels in, metaphorically. “All marriages are. That’s what marriage is.”

“I’m sure. I’m sure.” It’s sort of all Kent can say. “I guess, yeah, let’s get fucking married. Let’s do it fucking tomorrow. Let’s go and sign some goddamn contract”—he waves it in Jack’s face—“and make filing our taxes slightly easier.”

“Are you being serious?”

Kent’s face falls. “No, Jack, fuck, of course I’m not being serious.” He pauses. “I can’t just—I need time to think about it.”

“Okay, well. Take all the time you need, I guess.”

“Thanks.” He folds the form up neatly, and hands it back to Jack. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you printed these out? I can’t believe—I need to pee, floss, and sleep, in that order. This is insane. I can’t—fuck.”

“Well, I need to call my parents,” Jack announces, “and tell them you didn’t say yes.”

“Great,” Kent agrees, and he has to brush his teeth to the angry half-sobs of Jack telling his parents, in French, that Kent didn’t automatically agree to enter into a marriage. While Kent is doing squats and wiping the crust of evaporated come off of his thighs, he has to listen to Jack angrily disturbing the mini-bar, and then getting into bed with a packet of Smarties.

“The cliché thing to do would be to drink,” Kent says.

“You wish I would get drunk?”

“I wish a lot of things, Jack, but never that.” The light is still on overhead, the windows open to the snowstorm outside. “I don’t think you get how much I care about you.”

“I know you care about me.”

“Then why can’t you—why can’t you show me?”

“I just asked you to marry me,” Jack says.

“No, you thrust a marriage application print-out into my hands and said it would be financially prudent to get married.”

“I don’t really see the difference.” Kent can hear him tearing open the package of Smarties.

“Don’t fucking eat candy in bed.”

“I’m on vacation,” Jack argues.

“Fine,” Kent says, reaching over to turn out the light. “Don’t save yourself for me. Don’t save yourself for you daughter.”

Jack puts the candy on the side table, and lets out a sigh. “You don’t have to save me from anything, Kent, it’s okay.”

“Tell that to me forty years ago when I can still do something about it.”

Jack never replies, just wraps his arms around Kent’s shoulders; kisses him goodnight.

I’ll talk about this with the therapist, Kent thinks as he’s falling asleep.

* * *

Back from their trip, Kent gets a text from Greer as he’s brushing out the kitten. Her coat is all matted; Ceci’s done an awful job.

“Rescheduled for this weekend,” the text reads. “Still available?”

“You’re shit at this clandestine stuff,” Kent writes back. “You don’t leave this kind of trail.”

“Why, does my dad read your texts?”

“No,” Kent replies. “But you didn’t know that, did you?”

“Whatever,” she writes back.

Kent sighs; the comb is stuck in Hazel’s fur. She hisses at him, poor baby, and he thinks: in my own fucking house?


	2. ii

One of the problems is, Kent cannot lie to Jack. Not a little white lie, not to spare Jack’s feelings, and not without complete foresight of any potential fallout. Fortunately, the truth is just as malleable as public perception, and Kent’s an ace at that manipulating that, pun intended.

“I’m going down to see my mom,” he announces over dinner, pushing peas around his plate. He tried to sauté them in olive oil, with lemon and mint. It didn’t really work. They’re as hard as rocks, like pebbles, starchy little things with the aftertaste of northern California.

The main dish is Coho salmon, which is supposed to be good for a person’s heart—the right kind of fat. Jack is flaking it apart with his fork, probably sad that Kent didn’t check it for bones, like usual. “What’s wrong with your mom?” he asks.

All three cats are watching them eat, sitting at their feet around the base of the kitchen table. One of the old girls is rubbing her face over and over the calves of Kent’s jeans. He’s going to need to get the lint brush before he cleans up the dishes.

“Nothing’s wrong.” An awkward pause. “I mean, nothing’s wrong with my mom. I just haven’t seen her for a while, you know?”

“She’ll be here for Thanksgiving in a few weeks,” Jack says. “Won’t she?”

It’s true that Kent’s sister, Brigid, is going to bring her up to Quebec for American Thanksgiving. It’s slightly backward, Kent admits, but his mother’s decided, this year, that her apartment’s too small—it’s no smaller than it ever was, including the fact that she raised two children in it, but she’s come to that conclusion now, and she won’t go to the city for Brigid to host, either. Kent floated ideas: they could all go away, or they could rent a house nearly anywhere—Martha’s Vineyard, or Montauk, or fucking Maine, or whatever.

“Oh, I don’t want to impose” means very little when you’re ending up in someone’s house. Bob and Alicia will come. Jack will extend the invitation pretty broadly. They’ve never hosted a Thanksgiving before—in their own home, that is, on Thanksgiving. American Thanksgiving. Real Thanksgiving, Kent thinks. He wonders what Greer’s doing—he’ll invite her when he’s down there with her. Jack did already, he’s sure. If she were planning on coming, he’d have heard of it by now.

“Jack,” Kent says, quietly. He’s considering whether to quit the peas and serve himself salad. “I’m just gonna go see how she’s doing, make sure everything’s okay. She didn’t want to have Thanksgiving, you know? It’s weird.”

“You want to get away from me.” It’s pretty matter-of-fact.

“Of course I don’t want to get away from you. I just need time, Jack, okay?”

“How much time? Is thirty-five years not enough time?”

“We got interrupted in the middle, though,” says Kent, “and I mean, I need more than two days, jeez, just let me—I need to process.”

It’s true, he does need to process. And it’s also true that he’s going to see his mother. Syracuse is way out to the west, convenient to Poughkeepsie in no way whatsoever. But he can’t lie to Jack, and what’s more, he really needs to decompress.

“I could come.”

Kent says nothing about that. He asks, “You want some salad?”

“Sure.” Jack’s appetite seems diminished. He pushes his plate in Kent’s direction and pushes the heel of his hand into his temple.

“Headache?” Kent asks.

“Yeah. It’ll go away.”

“Mmm.” When Kent shifts to pile arugula on Jack’s plate, the cat trills and runs away, scared.

“She’ll be back,” Jack says. “They always come back, or at least, they used to.”

“I’m coming back, Zimms, jesus, you don’t have to be a drama queen.”

Jack accepts his plate of salad and eats it as he pointedly looks away.

The unfairness of it all is so exhausting. Everything is on Jack Zimmermann time, always. Well, Kent supposes, Jack has a mental illness; Jack is on the spectrum; Jack was raised like a little prince. Kent has—well, he has a lot, and he can’t pretend that’s not the case. But it’s different, he knows it’s different, in this small but real way he always wants to bring up in therapy. The most annoying thing about therapy is that year after year, shrink after shrink, no one gives you any easy answers. He could lay all of this out for his current weekly and ask, “But I’m not crazy, right? It’s uneven?” and she’d just fold her hands over her crossed knees and lean in and say, “Well, why do you think that’s how you perceive it?” Sometimes Kent just wants validation, someone to tell him he’s not making this shit up in his head, without turning it into reasons he shouldn’t be with Jack at all, which is Brigid’s current strategy for getting him to shut up. (It’s effective.) But, fuck her, she’s always got some guy treating her like shit in between courses over tasting menus. Maybe what he was supposed to learn after all these years is that there are no easy answers, and no one who can tell him if he’s right or wrong. The thought is so depressing that he throws in the towel halfway through his salad and sighs and pushes his chair away.

“You done?” Jack asks, still chewing lettuce.

“No.” Now he’s obligated to keep going. “I have meringues for dessert.”

“Did you make them?”

“No, they’re from the place in town.” There’s only one bakery on the main drag in Knowlton.

“I like your meringues.”

“I’ve never made a meringue.”

“I could swear—”

“Well, you’d be swearing in vain, because I have never made a meringue in my life.” The look on Jack’s face is confused. A cat puts her paws on his thigh. Before Jack can pet her, Kent bends over, grabs her, puts her back down on the floor. She clucks at him, like, why? Kent sits up. “You must be confusing me with, you know, another baker.”

“I guess. I could have—”

“Mais, non,” Kent insists. Egg whites terrify him, ever since he tried to make an angel food cake and utterly, messily failed. He could do it now, probably, if he wanted to. That was many years back, when he’d just moved to Quebec, and before he understood that the number of ingredients listed in no way correlated to skill level required. He’s better these days, but not great—he doesn’t excel. Doesn’t matter, really. He’s good at other things.

The cat is complaining pretty loud now.

“She wants some salad,” Jack says.

“No. Ignore her.”

“She doesn’t like being ignored.”

“Well, that doesn’t make her special in this house.” Kent grins at his own joke.

* * *

What’s confusing to Kent, about how everything’s coming unfurled, is how Jack could be so insistent on the marriage thing, and so hurt that Kent can’t rush into it, and yet so incredibly inarticulate on the topics of why he wants to get married, and what made him ask now after all this time, and what he thinks he’s learned about marriage since his last one came to a public and messy conclusion that makes him think it’s a great idea.

Kent unravels the worst possible answer for his shrink: “What if it’s just, like, he’s a hockey player, and he thinks if he lost in round one last time he can make it through round two next season?”

“What are the rounds between two and the final?”

“Me dying, I think,” Kent says.

“That’s morbid.”

“I mean, by this metaphor, which admittedly is a stupid metaphor, to get to the championship he’s gotta ‘win’ our marriage and move on to some other marriage. Which is unthinkable between you and me, like, I can imagine some girl wanting to be with him, you know, for the money? But Jack never goes anywhere he can meet girls, I mean, aside from charity shit and NHL functions, and when he talks to people he doesn’t already know it’s like—I mean, you must have some idea, I’ve been complaining about him for years now.”

“Well,” she says, “you bring up a lot of issues.”

“Just, I don’t get it,” Kent insists. “It’s driving me crazy, I don’t get it. The only possible motivation I can think of is that he failed the first time and he has this ‘win’ mentality so now he has to try again. It’s not about money, whatever he says, if we broke up I wouldn’t need a dime of his money. I’m on the BioSteel payroll forever. And Nevada doesn’t have income tax! The one thing that should never be an issue in our relationship is money. If we broke up we’d just, I dunno, go our separate ways, with that. Everything’s all separate. Except the house, I guess, but he could buy me out of my half.”

“Maybe he’s not worried about breaking up, Kent. Maybe he’s worried about other things.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I can’t speak for myself in this regard, but if you were to have a health crisis—you’re both getting older, and you know Jack is very pragmatic.”

“Okay, but, in Canada? I don’t see it happening.”

“Well, don’t you guys travel? What if you went to a country with fewer legal protections for same-sex couples, and something were to happen—would they allow Jack to make decisions on your behalf, and vice-versa?”

“Is that a reason to marry someone?” Kent asks. “Honestly.”

“I think it is for a lot of people, yes.”

“I’d rather write a living will.”

“Well.” She checks her watch, sighing. “That’s a good idea too, yes.”

“Remind me to do that, then,” he says. “But, I don’t know, it isn’t such an easy decision.  Maybe I don’t want it.”

“What’s not easy about it? Why don’t you want it?”

“It’s just a bad idea!”

“What makes you say It’s a bad idea?”

“He already went through one fucked-up marriage, and I don’t know what ruined it. Maybe he ruined it. Maybe having a kid ruined it. I wasn’t—I don’t know. I don’t know why he wants this. I don’t know if he loves me. I mean, he has to? But he probably doesn’t.”

“Why do you think he doesn’t?”

“Well, for one thing, he never says so.”

“And someone has to say it to make it true?”

“No, I said, ‘for one thing,’ there’s also other things, and I don’t know that love is connected to marriage anyway, I mean, seems like it’s not. Based on what I’ve seen. Don’t make me explain anymore. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”

Kent is almost embarrassed to utter such bullshit; his therapist doesn’t buy this, but she also doesn’t press him on it. Instead, she checks the clock—her phone, this time—and says, “You’re going out of town this weekend?”

“Yeah,” he says. “The abortion thing, yeah.”

“And you’re going to see your mom?”

He’s had a lot longer to develop a position on _that_ one. “Yeah,” he says, unflustered. “ _That_ one, I’m fine with.”

He has a post-therapy routine, the same one he’s had for a while. It involves messing around the city, eating half a bagel, and sitting in the park. Even in November, when it’s chilly on a warm day and there’s snow on the ground out in the sticks, Kent subjects himself to the pain. He dresses properly, and all that, owns a good coat and knows how to layer. He’s spent many long afternoons sitting in the Parc Outremont and wondering if he’d have lasted so long in hockey had he not been in Vegas, the dry heat a balm on his infirm joints and strained muscles. He could go back, if he wanted. But, he left; he doesn’t want to. He wonders why they never had a conversation about Jack, maybe, going out there. Kent knows this is a better place, like a city, with more culture, like Europe, and that it’s closer to his family, which is convenient, and he grew up here, in a way. He has his bagel and his coffee and two texts from Jack that say, “When are you coming home?” and “I have a headache.”

It's quiet, midday in the park, late autumn. No one bothers him here.

“Take something,” Kent writes back.

“I did.”

“Sorry.” Kent sighs. “Go lie down in the den.”

Jack sends back a picture of a pair of glowing cat eyes, hiding deep under the bed; Kent can tell by the rug pattern. “This one puked up a hairball,” Jack writes.

Kent puts his coffee on the ground between his feet and stuffs the bagel in between his legs so he can peer as closely as possible at the picture. He’s still staring when Jack adds, “I cleaned it up already. Now she won’t come out.”

“Don’t bug her,” Kent replies. “She’s sick, poor old baby girl.”

They have three long-haired cats. Hairballs are not strangers in their home.

Jack writes, “You care more about these cats than you care about me.”

Of all the nerve, Kent thinks, squishing the bagel between his knees until cream cheese fills the deli paper. It takes him a moment to come up with, “There’s three of them. There’s only one of you.”

Kent begins to think of all of the things he _could_ say.

“What does that mean?” Jack asks.

 _I love you so much I hate myself_ , or, _It’s pathetic that you’re jealous of cats_ , or, _Of course I care about you more, you fat impotent baby_.

But it’s mid-afternoon and Kent’s hip replacement hurts; his coffee is cold and he’s already eaten his half of a bagel. He has spent a lot of his life crafting the perfect, long-toothed insult, and it hasn’t gotten him too much, or too far. Many hours of white-hot, immediately satisfying _gotcha_ , followed by months and months and _years_ , sometimes, of regret and blinding fury. Anyway, nothing he’s come up with is very clever.

“I’m walking to the car,” he says. He picks up his coffee and hoists himself from the bench. He throws away the half-empty cup and the rest of the bagel. “I’ll be home soon. Text if I should pick up anything.”

“I have everything I want,” Jack replies.

Kent doubts it.

* * *

He knows the drive from the city back to Knowlton like the back of his hand at this point. It’s good in his roadster—he’ll have to retire it for the winter soon. He hasn’t thought much about which car he’ll take to New York. That he even has to choose is a facet of excess. It might not be too late in the year, and it might be warmer south of the border—but maybe his mother’s old knees would prefer something she wouldn’t have to stoop into. Then again, she still walks up three flights to her apartment. They’ll have to do something about it, Brigid and him—if not this year, then next year, and if not next year, well. “Nothing’s gone wrong yet,” Brigid would say, but you don’t wait until something _has_ , do you? You adjust so it won’t.

Then there’s Greer. Would she prefer not to have to fold herself into a fancy little car, like, _after_? If he brought something more reasonable, he could help her do errands—drive her to the grocery store, or whatever they have in Poughkeepsie, probably a Target. Probably everything, really. It wasn’t the middle of nowhere, exactly. Nowhere in America is nowhere anymore, Kent has noticed. Or maybe he’s just been in Canada for too long.

Having decided to take the Lexus that weekend, the remainder of the drive home is spent inventing some way to call Jack a “fat impotent baby.” The idea of it is delicious, but it wouldn’t be very nice to call him that, would it? Where would that get them? But he is a fat impotent baby, or at least, he is fat and impotent, and he acts like a baby a lot of the time, especially recently. There’s another half hour left in the drive when Kent admits to himself that, no, it’s not a very nice thing to call Jack, and that’s what makes it so delicious, and just thinking about it—the resultant look on Jack’s face in particular—makes every pleasure center in Kent’s brain light up. By the time he’s pulled onto the long road to their driveway, Kent knows he’ll have to be satisfied with that. Just, what a mean thing to say that would be. But, Kent isn’t a mean person. He _won’t_ be a mean person, or he won’t act like he is. He thinks about how, at the door, he’ll put his head on Jack’s chest and Jack will take his wrists in hand—but then Jack isn’t at the door at all. Only two cats are there to greet him.

They’re good girls—they never run from the house, though Kent is careful to close the garage before he actually steps into the mudroom, where he hangs his coat and removes his boots, unravels his scarf and sheds his deeper layers: a pullover, then a button-down. Long-underwear season hasn’t settled on Quebec just yet.

The third cat is sleeping on Jack’s stomach. She looks up before Jack wakes, then stands and stretches. Jack’s sleep isn’t bothered by any of this. The TV is on and Kent turns it off, the cat having stepped down from her perch and come to rub against his ankles.

He picks her up. “Did you barf up a hairball?” he asks her. “Were you hiding from Daddy?”

Jack doesn’t like that, but he’s sleeping. Snoring, even. “I have a human child,” he would have said, were he awake.

Either Kent’s ass is small enough, or their couch is large enough—it doesn’t matter, though it’s probably the latter—that he can wedge himself down onto it, next to Jack’s legs, cat in arms. She swipes, thanklessly, in the direction of Kent’s face. “No,” he says, in a baby voice. “Don’t swipe me, no, that’s bad.” Himalayans are talkative; she’s complaining, and Kent ignores her.

Jack puts an eye open, saying, “Hey, you’re back.”

“Yep.”

“How’d it go?”

“Fine.”

“Did you talk about me?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” The cat has begun to struggle, and Kent puts her on the floor. “How’re you?”

“Headache.” Jack closes his eyes again.

“Should I get you a washcloth or something?”

“That’d be nice, sure.”

Sometimes—rarely, but, sometimes—Kent thinks of the distance from the den to the linen closet, and finds it daunting. So far, such a wide-open floorplan—someday, he thinks, _someday_ , every little trip between rooms will be too far. Not yet, he tells himself, taking the washcloth from the linen closet to the guest bathroom. Not yet, he thinks, waiting for cold water to come out of the tap. Not yet, he understands, wringing the cloth out over the sink. But _someday_ , he knows, sitting down on the couch again next to Jack.

You shouldn’t wait until something happens, he reminds himself.

Jack’s put a hand over his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m getting my mom’s headaches.”

“Everyone gets their mom’s something,” Kent says. “It’s not all good stuff, I mean, that’s not how genetics works. You can’t have _just_ the cheekbones; it’s a package deal.”

“Glad I’m married to a geneticist suddenly.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Zimms.” Kent looks at him and thinks, this could be my fat, impotent husband. “Here,” he says. “Put this over your eyes.”

* * *

Jack’s father calls as Kent is packing, last-minute, on Thursday morning. He ought to have done it last night, but there were other things to do: portion out a long weekend’s worth of raw cat food; watch the Aces game (at the Hurricanes, duly slaughtered); sex. Slow, deliberate, really deep and cathartic sex—Jack burned another Viagra on it, “Because you’re going away,” which is almost a sweet sentiment. He’s not supposed to take them with regularity; they’re bad for his heart, or maybe they fuck with his meds. Either way, they usually do it in the morning before Jack has taken his drugs, but Kent thought he would have left already, seeing as it’s nearly 10. Of course, he hasn’t, because instead of packing last night he—he’d better tell Jack to make sure someone strips the bed.

Halfway through picking various flannel shirts, Kent pushes his bag over and sits down to get the phone.

“This a bad time?” Bob is, fuck, he’s like eighty-something. Doesn’t seem it. He could probably out-bench either of them. “Heard you were going out of town for the weekend.”

Kent knows Jack has plans to go see them—his parents—while he’s home alone. Maybe this is about that.

“I am, yeah.”

“Glad I caught you then,” he says. “Have you been thinking about—what he asked you?”

Oh, jesus. Oh, of course—this is about _that_. “I’ve been thinking about it,” Kent says. “I’m not—how do I put this?” Fuck, now he’ll never get on the road by 11. “I was under the impression that Jack didn’t want to get remarried.” He pauses. When Bob doesn’t say anything, Kent adds, “I’m thinking about it.”

“That’s fair.” As much as Kent knows he doesn’t _need_ Bob’s support, he does sort of feel that he deserves it. “I promised Jack I wouldn’t meddle,” he says, sounding older than he seems in person. Maybe Kent shouldn’t be surprised; it’s not as if they often speak on the phone. “And I know you have to get going, so I’ll keep it quick. No matter what you decide, Alicia and I want you to know, you’ll always be part of the family.”

Stupidly, Kent blurts out, “We’re not breaking up, Bob.” Part of him wants to add, forcefully, “Ever,” but Kent can’t promise that to Bob any more than he can promise it to himself. There have been times over the years when it seemed likely, or even imminent. Keeping it together while they played on different teams was hard, and figuring out how to go forward when their careers ended not much easier. In fact, it had been worse in some ways, with Jack wanting to move to Los Angeles, and Kent not minding that idea in the least—except for the fact that it would have been marred by Bittle’s presence. Some days Kent wishes they’d ended up there, if he thinks about it—but Quebec isn’t so bad. Strange they had so many arguments about it.

His sister had once chided him, “Maybe you weren’t _meant_ to be anywhere,” which was an awfully bold position, coming from her; she’d landed below Fourteenth Street for college, and hadn’t moved a mile away in thirty years. Whether it was because she was meant to be there, or simply had no cause to leave, Kent isn’t sure.

What he _is_ sure of is that Bob thinks of him as family, which is as sweet as it might be demented.

In any case, Bob says, “Even if you did, son. I don’t want you to think you have to say yes to something on that account.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kent agrees. “But I appreciate the reassurance.”

“I know you do. But, you have to get going. Say hi to your mom for us.”

“I’ll tell her,” Kent agrees.

“Take care on that drive.”

“I always do.”

“I know you do. I know. It means a lot.”

“Thanks, Bob. It means a lot to me, too.”

Hanging up the phone, it’s enough to make Kent want to march up to Jack and announce, “Your dad just called me.” He thinks about it for a few minutes, the phone face-down now on the bed while he methodically rolls up flannel shirts. The thing with driving home alone is, he’s got nothing he has to come back for. He could stay away for an extra night or an extra week. He doesn’t have to come back if he doesn’t want to. There’s nothing tethering him here if he doesn’t want that. Most people have jobs, loved ones, possessions they can’t replace, mortgages. Kent’s job, such as it is, is hounding the seemingly endless number of faceless old men who fit the narrow profile of hockey executives and university administrators. He’s met with congresspeople; once a lame-duck Nevada senator did him a solid and introduced a bill to regulate mandated recovery times in professional sports. Then someone tacked on an amendment to fund a new funicular in some national park, and the whole thing dissolved into arguing, and whatever happened to that bill, Kent doesn’t know, but he and Jack got an invitation to that senator’s third wedding. Lovely guy. There is definitely no mandated recovery period in any US professional sport. There probably never will be.

He can do that kind of lobbying anywhere, is the thing. It would almost certainly be easier if he weren’t in Montreal.

It’s tough to decide who to say goodbye to first: the cats, or Jack?

“You’ll send me lots of pictures,” Kent says, because Jack’s done that before when he’s gone out of town alone.

“Sure.” Jack is holding Hazel in his arms like a baby, one big hand under her furry ass and another bracing her head against his breast. “It’s been a while since I took some good cat pictures. Okay.” She purrs in his arms and looks up at him with such love—Kent knows.  He feels that way, too, sometimes, like a really small creature and like Jack is so warm and so constant. It can also feel like Jack is many people and some of them are warmer and more constant than the others. Today he just seems sad, babying one cat while the other two follow at his heels, meowing.

Kent opens the door to the freezer and explains, “I portioned out a week’s worth of food, just in case. You won’t need that much, but, it’s good to have some. Just remember, the bags for Hazel are marked with ‘Hazel,’ because that’s a different formula. Big girls get big-girl dinner, for older cats. See, I put those bags of pellets on the left side of the shelf, here—”

“Kenny, I’m not stupid.” Finally, he puts the cat down; immediately, she rubs her cheek on his bare feet. “It’s not the end of the world if the food gets mixed up.”

“Yes it is,” Kent says, “which is why you have to feed Hazel in the pantry, and shut the door while you put out the stuff for the other two.”

“These cats should be grateful,” Jack says. “This is quite a bit of—frippery.”

That’s such a Bittle word to pull out for no reason. “Do you want me to go over grooming?”

“I know how to brush a cat, Parse.”

“Twice a day, first with the undercoat brush, and then—”

“With the comb?”

“Yeah, and, twice a day, unless you want hairballs—and, _after_ you feed them. And if you do miss a day or something, it’s fine, don’t panic—I mean, panic if you have to, but just, use the mat breaker, or call someone—I left the groomer’s e-mail—“

“I really think we’re going to be okay.”

“That’s good to hear,” Kent says, slowly. “I mean, it’s a relief to hear that.”

“Why, you think I won’t be okay without you?”

“No, I mean—I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Jack rolls his eyes. “I’ll text if something goes wrong,” he says. “ _Obviously_.”

Walking back to the front door, Kent says, “I’m sure you’ll call if you _think_ something goes wrong. It’s just, will you _know—_ ”

“Of course.” Jack picks up Kent’s bag. “Don’t worry, I got it.”

“I can carry my own bag, Jack.”

“You get the door, I’ll get this.”

They walk out to the car—the Lexus is nice, pretty comfortable. Kent doesn’t mess with self-driving cars, though he appreciates their value. He just likes driving, is the thing. Jesus, it’s a long way to Syracuse.

After hefting the bag into the trunk, Jack slams it and says, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just say goodbye, Jack. I’ll be back in like, three days.”

“I just feel this sense of, I don’t know.”

Kent knows what he means, is the thing, and he’s not wrong, it’s just—“That’s just your, you know.” He taps the side of his head. “I know this doesn’t make it okay, but, everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“You’re going to come home.”

Kent looks at the house. He looks back at Jack. His pupils have shrunk to the size of little seeds, just pinpricks awash in cornflower iris. It’s a weirdly sunny day, bright without cloud cover, and through the newly bare trees on the property, the lake shimmers in the distance, not unlike the color of Jack’s eyes. It’s beautiful driving weather, even if the forecast for Poughkeepsie calls for rain over the weekend. Kent is lucky, right now. In this moment, he’s okay.

“Of course I’m coming home,” Kent says, the offense in his tone perhaps a reaction to the fact that Jack just somehow _knows_ he was thinking, half an hour ago, about not doing that, maybe. “Everything’s fine, Zimms. You’re gonna be okay. You can call me while I’m driving. Nothing bad is going to happen while I’m gone.”

“Maybe I will. Call you, um.”

“Yeah, please do.” Kent would be surprised if he did. He pulls his keys out of his pocket, even though the door should be unlocked just from standing nearby. Old habits, and all that. “I’ll just be back on Monday or Tuesday. And I’ll say hi to my mom for you, obviously.”

It rushes out of Jack like a sigh: “ _Okay_.” He wraps his arms around Kent’s shoulders, pressing his weight into Kent’s body. “Be safe on the road, Kenny, _please_.”

“I will. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Jack agrees, and he lets go.

For some demented reason, Kent leans up and kisses his lips. He tastes like the overnight oats he had for breakfast, with blueberry and agave syrup. Kent left several pre-portioned jars of that in the fridge, too.

“I don’t know why I ended up here,” Kent says, his lips wet now. “But, fuck, this is taking forever.”

“I’ll just—” Jack gestures with his shoulder back to the house.

“Yeah,” Kent agrees, “you just.” It’s hard to get in the car and shut the door, but he does it. First he wants to sit behind the wheel and watch Jack walk, barefoot, back to the front door. But they have a long driveway, and he’s already late, and border security could take forever, even if it probably won’t.

So, he slides the car into reverse, and looks behind to back away.

* * *

There are many ways to get to Syracuse, but Kent takes his favorite: up and around Lac-Brome and then a southwesterly course along the river. The crossing is at the Thousand Islands Bridge, in Ontario. It is actually a series of many bridges, and Kent doesn’t know how many islands there are, exactly—it could be a thousand, or maybe fewer, but there are many, densely forested if the green a little thinner as winter gathers. One benefit to leaving later is that he’s missed the build-up at passport control. He hands over a worn, blue booklet, nearing the end of its ten-year validity, and his Canadian permanent resident card.

The guard looks at him, then at the passport, then at Kent again, and stamps it. He hands it back, the card tucked inside. “I’m a Sabres fan,” he says.

“Islanders, growing up,” Kent replies.

The guard says, “Welcome home, Mister Parson,” but doesn’t ask for an autograph, probably just wants to keep traffic moving. A barrier lifts and Kent slips the Lexus back into drive.

* * *

When Kent was growing up, his mother never named her cats. She still doesn’t. She has five these days, all long-haired, none of them named. Three are out when he gets to her condo.

“You shouldn’t let the cats out,” Kent tells her, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “What if something happens?”

Perhaps because they’ve had this conversation before, over the longue durée, his mother shrugs it off, like, my dumb boy, what does he know? The cats that haven’t gone out on the prowl are sitting attentively, staring up at Kent.

“Say hello to the kids,” Karan says.

This used to bother _the fuck_ out of Kent, like, no? He was the kid? These were _cats_. The older he gets the less he cares, though—he’s not a kid, by a long shot, and therapy has taught him to stop protecting the kid he used to be. So, fine, let his mother displace him for some cats—he _loves_ cats. Good for her, and for them. And for him, honestly.

“Hi,” he says, and the larger one, a scraggly orange cat she’s had for years now, approaches to sniff the soles of his shoes. They’re just Adidas, probably faintly scented like the dirt of a Montreal city park. His clothes and his body must smell very exciting, to a cat: like Jack, like sweat, like the toasted engine air that circulates through his Lexus, and like his cats back home, civilized young women compared to this yowling thing.

Kent stoops to pet him, and he knocks the side of his face into Kent’s knee.

"Bob Zimmermann told me to say hi," Kent says.

“Put it in your room,” she says, not bothering to gesture to his bag. “I’m making dinner.”

“Mother.” He stands up. “It’s like, so early.”

“It’s a hotdish.”

Well, that explains the smell. “For fuck’s sake, not hotdish. I have so much money. Can’t we go out to dinner?”

“It’s tuna, but I know you’re healthy so I put in green beans.”

“That sounds healthy, right.” He follows her into the kitchen, which isn’t much of a trip; it’s a galley tucked behind an island.

The counter is littered in generic cans of mushroom soup, potato-skin peelings piled on a bread plate, an open cardboard canister of grocery-brand breadcrumbs, and blanched green beans. The casserole dish has been buttered, and there’s tuna at the bottom.

Kent reaches for a green bean, and she slaps his hand away with a spatula. “Get out of here,” she says. “I have to make the hotdish.” He throws his hands up and backs out of the kitchen slowly, like he’s retreating from a scrape on the ice. Weird how his feet slide back, one behind the other, instead of stepping like anyone else’s would.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she says. “Put that bag away.”

There’s nothing Kent is less hungry for than tuna and the rest of that all mixed together into slop, and baked. He’s already got the one recipe of his mother’s that’s worth making: cardamom buns, yeasty-soft and barely sweet on Christmas morning. This is going to be hard, but he reminds himself: you’re doing this for Greer. You’re protecting Greer. She is spoiled, and she is a bitch, but she needs you. You are needed. You don’t have to eat more than a few bites of hotdish. Maybe there’s some stale bread in the fridge. Maybe there’s Ryvita.

He texts Jack, “Got here fine. Bad news. She’s making hotdish.”

“I love hotdish,” Jack writes back.

Well, Kent thinks to himself, I love being treated like a person and not like a piece of furniture, so maybe we should have traded places growing up.

He replies, “Drive was easy. Weather was perfect. Border guard was a Sabres fan.”

Jack sends back a frowning emoji, and then: “Too bad for him, eh?”

“Send me cat pics,” Kent says.

So Jack sends one of himself in the mirror of the master bedroom, Hazel in a one-armed hold against his chest. “This one misses you,” Jack writes.

“You must mean the cat,” Kent says.

Jack sends back another unhappy face.

Kent puts his phone on the bedside table and sits down on the bed. It’s military-made, the only thing in the apartment not littered in cat hair. She must have made it just for him; how nice. He thinks of Jack’s childhood bedroom, which is mostly the same as it ever was, going all the way back to their dry-humping—well, some of it was pretty wet—back in juniors. It’s not that Jack’s parents are so sentimental; they just have no need for that extra bedroom. If they stay over, there’s a proper guest room for them—Greer gets Jack’s old digs. Bob and Alicia are never going to move out of that house, Kent thinks, as he studies the cat shelves that ring the otherwise bare walls in his childhood bedroom. The master suite of that house is on the ground floor, and they already have live-in help. Weird to think about how easy it would be to just die there. Karan can’t stay in this apartment forever; Kent doesn’t see Brigid letting that cramp her style. He is trying not to reach the obvious conclusion.

He opens the closet, and stuffed in there with his old, _old_ hockey gear and the ancient sewing machine are sacks and sacks of litter. There’s litter scattered across the carpet, too, even though it’s lined with recent vacuuming and the small imprints of where his mother walked in and out to make the bed. The box is under the desk. It smells, faintly, though it would have to. Five cats are a lot.

He heads back to the kitchen. “Do you want wood floors?”

She looks up from where she’s stirring soup into tuna. “What?”

“I just think it would be easier if you had wood instead of carpet,” he says. “It would make this place easier to sell, not to mention clean.”

“The carpet’s good. Only had it ten years.”

“That’s old for a carpet if you have _five cats_ , Mother.”

“I didn’t have five always. Only got the little gray one this June.”

“She’s not going to be little forever.”

“If you’re not helping, Kenny, you get out of my kitchen.”

He rolls up the sleeves of his flannel. “Okay, let me help.”

“I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

Kent stiffens. “How long will that be?”

She doesn’t blink, or even look at him. “Not long.”

He uses the time to snoop around, which he considers his sovereign right—he moved away from home nearly forty years ago, but there’s something real and true about the place you were formed in that’s impossible to entirely shake. Besides, he paid off the mortgage. He did that well before he did anything else, didn’t he? He won’t go in her room, but there’s plenty more to sniff out. He checks all the cat boxes, and empties the ones that need scooping. He sees that while he’s done that, another cat has come home through the back door, via the shared terrace.

“Mother,” he shouts, from the hallway to the kitchen—through the entire apartment. “If you’re going to let these cats out, put tags on them!”

“What?” she screams back.

“Put tags on them!”

“Kenny, I can’t hear you!”

He gets up and goes to the kitchen. “If you’re going to let the cats out,” he repeats, “shouldn’t you put tags on them?”

“They got chipped at the shelter, every one.” She sniffs, and peeks into the oven. Kent probably can’t hear her creaking when she gets up, but he sure imagines it. “Hotdish almost done,” she says.

“Great.”

“Set the table.”

“Sure.”

He knows precisely how she wants it—there are linens in the buffet, a laminate thing from Value Furniture which was the last thing his parents acquired together; they hadn’t even furnished a nursery for Brigid. Then again, she wasn’t Brigid yet, then, just some glob of cells of which it was possible they weren’t aware. When younger, Kent thought about what might have done it, what might have made his father go. Maybe it was the joylessness of stuffing linens into a peach-colored laminate buffet. It’s all faded now, almost white. Every time Kent sets the table, the knocks into the venetian blinds when he stands, and his mother shouts, from the kitchen, “You okay?”

“Never better,” Kent says. He inspects the tablecloth and the napkins for signs of physical debris, or new stains—but they seem fine. I have so much money, he thinks, pulling the cloth across the mirrored table. It doesn’t need to be like this, Kent thinks, though he thinks that increasingly these days. He gets out the towel onto which he knows she’s going to want to set the casserole. He doesn’t really want to eat it, but as he’s smoothing out the corners of the towel he thinks to himself that someday, he’ll eat the last bite of hotdish he ever consumes. The issue is, will he know it?

While his mother finishes up, he texts Jack: “What’s the last thing you ever want to eat?”

Jack writes back, “You mean my least favorite thing?” He then sends a picture of some leftover drumsticks from the night before. He captions it, “Ha ha.”

Kent is typing out, “lololol” when his mother interrupts him. “Come here and help me,” she orders. “Put your phone away.”

“I’m texting Jack,” he says, following her back into the kitchen.

She doesn’t care about that. “Here, you take the hotdish, and I’ll get the rest”—flatware, two plates, two juice glasses, and a carafe of plain iced tea. Back when he was still playing, she wouldn’t let him carry anything hot, like an insulated casserole dish might burn him down to the bone and ruin his hockey career.

They sit. She’s always been Lutheran, so he asks, “Are we going to say grace?”

She snorts, waving it away, as if it’s an absurd question, like it isn’t as they’ve always done. “I’ve moved past that,” she says. “What’s the good lord ever done for me?”

Kent doesn’t believe in any lord, good or otherwise, and is relatively certain his mother never had, either, though he can understand that there was nothing else doing all her girlhood on those North Dakota plains, just the good lord and the plowing and, finally, James Parson’s rakish good looks and hollow promises. To be difficult, Kent says, “Gave you two very successful and attractive children.”

“Gave me children who think they’re a gift from god, more like,” she says. “Forget it.”

And Kent isn’t totally sure what she thinks they’re forgetting here, but he knows what she’s ignoring: that he only has two cheeks but he has turned them so frequently that he’s all but gotten dizzy. One week he hadn’t enough pocket money to buy his own chicken tenders when he went out for dinner with Jack; the next he was promising to pay off her mortgage. And, sure, it was only two-fifty-k, or thereabouts, and sure, it took him a while to get that paycheck. But he thought of her first.

“You wanna pray to god, Kent Parson, you go ahead,” she says. “I’m serving myself hotdish.”

It’s not until the end of the meal, Kent having picked out all of the green beans from his serving, that she says, “What brings you down here?”

She’s not going to blab to anyone, is the thing. She’s a loner, and she doesn’t use social media, and she doesn’t have even a working relationship with Jack, and has never met Bitty, likely never will. “Jack’s daughter needs an abortion,” he says casually, wishing she’d put what’s left of the hotdish away. “You know, Greer, you remember. Curly blonde, brown eyes, you know Greer.”

“I guess.” She doesn’t seem interested. “Don’t see that boy”—she means Jack—“handling _that_ well.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, he doesn’t know. This is all secret, Ma. On the down-low, they used to say.”

“They used to say?”

“Like before I came out,” Kent reminds her. “On the down-low.”

“And you’re doing this because—?”

“Because she asked me.”

“Oh. Well, aren’t you nice.”

“I am nice.”

“And she lives in Syracuse?”

“No,” says Kent. “She’s in college at Vassar. So I’m going down there, to drive her to her appointment. Make sure she’s okay.”

“Boy,” she says. “Boy, a lot’s changed since my day.”

“People didn’t have abortions in the eighties?”

“They didn’t ask their daddy’s gay lover, I mean.”

“When you put it that way, Mother, it does sound pretty fucking eighties.”

“What can I say?” she raises her glass. “Now that I think about it, I changed my mind. I think that’s exactly who you oughta ask. Who else wouldn’t judge you?”

Kent raises a brow. “Who says I’m not judging?”

“That poor child.” She sips her iced tea, slowly, as if to make some kind of point. Kent says nothing, because that’s how he learned to survive his childhood, and then his professional hockey career in the closet, and then his professional hockey career out of the closet, and then his relationship with Jack, and now this dinner with his mother. She sets her glass down.

“She’s not a child,” Kent says, now that his mother’s done taking a sip of her iced tea. “She’s nineteen, and she’s a sophomore in college.”

“If you raise children, Kenny, anyone born after your children is children.”

What can he say to that, really? He doesn’t know. “Can we change tracks here, for a moment?”

She shrugs, as if she doesn’t care. She probably doesn’t.

“This is weird, but—Jack asked me to marry him?”

Kent isn’t sure what he was expecting, from his mother. Nothing specific, but, certainly _something_? If not excitement, then interest, or disappointment, or just, any reaction. Instead, she shrugs again.

“I guess he would,” she says. “Well, all right.”

“All right?”

She stands up. “What do you want me to say, Kent? You want me to tell you not to marry him?”

“I don’t even know if _I_ want to marry him, so, that might be helpful, yes.”

She picks up the leftover hotdish. There are about ten Parson-sized servings left; Jack would probably eat the whole thing in one sitting, if allowed. Well, maybe that’s a stretch—he’d eat half, and half the next day for lunch. “I don’t like him,” she says.

“You don’t like how he treats me?” Kent wonders. It’s not as if he doesn’t already know his mother really isn’t enthusiastic about Jack, though whether her lack of enthusiasm represented disinclination, or simple disinterest, or plain dislike was never clear to Kent. It’s clear now; she’s said as much.

“I just don’t like him,” she clarifies.

“Oh, thanks.” Kent gets up and follows her to the kitchen, trying to gather up the used dishes and silverware.

“No,” she snaps. “No, you stay there.”

“I should help,” he insists.

“No, you’re a guest, you sit. Sit down, Kenny. Go put your butt back in that chair.”

She’s his mother, so, he listens. He picks up his phone again, finally, while she’s bustling around, surely getting dessert together. There’s a single text from Jack: “Pie.” Kent hesitates for a moment, because, what even? But he scrolls back up, and, that’s right: “What’s the last thing you want to eat?” Kent feels sick for a moment, but it fades quickly into annoyance. Marry him? Burn his heart out, more like. Make him suffer.

Dessert is Jell-O, cubed and topped with sour cream. Karan can mask her feelings all she likes, but here’s the proof of her love: two flavors, lime and strawberry. Altogether, it looks like Christmas.

She reaches over the table to smooth his hair back. She used to do that when he was a kid—snipe at him about his hair: “You look ridiculous”—as if he didn’t know he looked ridiculous. As if she didn’t make him feel ridiculous about it his whole childhood. “It’s like Jim’s,” she says.

Kent looks up from his bowl of Jell-O.

“Sticks up,” she clarifies. “His stuck up, too.”

What is there to say to that? “I could shave my head.”

“Don’t do that. You’d look ridiculous.”

She already said he looked ridiculous. “Is there anything I _could_ do to improve my general appearance?”.

“Oh, Kenny,” says, with a dramatic sigh. “I really don’t think so. I’m afraid you’re stuck like that.”

As a kid, Kent would have worried about that all day. Now he doesn’t give a shit. He’s got bigger problems. “Remember when I used to ask you to make me this for my birthday, but like, with blue? Like in the commercials?”

“No, but of course I’m glad I didn’t. Food isn’t supposed to be blue.”

“You know, most parents would care about whether their kids were going to get married.”

She stiffens. “Oh,” she says, shocked. “No, you don’t care what I think.”

“How do you know what I care about?”

“What difference does it make?” she asks. “You’ve been living together for a long time. What would change? Would you throw a party?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I don’t want to have to pay for a party.”

“What have I ever asked you to pay for?”

“That’s fair.” She arranges some Jell-O onto her fork, the two uneven cubes just balancing, and uses a knife to smear sour cream atop it. It wobbles as she speaks: “Sorry I’m not most parents, and that I don’t care what you do. But you’ll be fine either way, and what’s going to change if you do get married? Nothing. So you have to decide if it’s something you want, or not,” She looks down, noticing that one of the cubes is about to slip right off her fork, saying, “oh, oops,” in an even way, and pushing the errant bit back into place as she lifts it to her mouth. “Me,” she says through a full mouth, “I’m a skeptic. Maybe you feel differently. I guess not, though.” She swallows. “You would’ve made him marry you by now if it mattered, is my guess.”

“He said it was about money. I don’t think it’s about money.”

“What do you think it’s about?”

Kent doesn’t miss a beat: “Winning. That’s all Jack cares about.”

“I think he won you years ago. He had you when you were practically a baby.”

“No, not _me_. He could give a shit about me. He cares about fixing whatever fucked up his first marriage. That’s how he operates. I tried to explain this to my therapist.”

“Oh, you’re still doing that?”

“Yeah, and she didn’t seem to get me, either. But who knows—nobody has the answer for me. All I know is this—I don’t see why marriage has to be the end to a relationship. Like, everything that happened before doesn’t mean anything unless you culminate in a marriage. I think that’s stupid. I think quite a bit has happened between us. Why can’t it stay how it is?”

“Then I guess you’ve got your answer.” She stands, stretching. “See, that settles it. Clear the table, would you?”

When she says “clear the table” she also means “do the dishes”—Kent finds her yellow rubber gloves where they’ve always been, balled under the sink with the scrub brushes and Comet. She taught him early on that there’s no point to putting dirty things into the dishwasher; Jack disagrees, but has learned to let Kent scour things tidy before the plates from dinner have had a chance to sit. Kent tries not to dwell on the inherent weirdness of growing up and moving out—or moving out and growing up, in his case—only to come home for a night and fall back into the old pattern of scrubbing while his mother stands next to the sink and fills the bowls with cat food. It was dry when he was growing up, just Fancy Feast or something, but he’s made her rich now, so she’s got all the time in the world to make her own.

“They love it,” she explains. “You know Hollis, from the Shipwright?” Kent doesn’t know who that is, but, the Shipwright is a bar where they don’t air hockey games. “He’s got a license and he shoots the deers that wander into his yard. He gets me a whole carcass, all ground and everything.”

“No, Mother, I don’t know Hollis, but, ew.”

“What’s ew? It makes good food, you know, for the kids.”

I’m the kid, Kent thinks to himself, shutting the tap off. I’m the kid, and I deserve a whole deer carcass. I don’t want it, but fuck, I’ve earned it.

He bends over to put away the gloves, and she nudges him with her heel. “Don’t get water on the floor.”

“I won’t.”

“Go see how many are waiting by the back door.”

“Okay.” He pauses. “Are you going to play piano?”

“Haven’t been doing it. Arthritis.” She flexes her fingers. She could be lying—how would he know? “Don’t get old, if you can help it. Boy, it’s no fun.”

She must be serious. “I had a hip replacement in my forties,” he says, because it’s like she’s forgotten that he’s suffered.

“Hm.” That’s all she says. She glops a half-cup of pulverized deer, bone, gristle, and taurine into a ceramic bowl. “You should get to sleep. It’s a long drive tomorrow.”

“It’s three and a half hours,” he says.

“That’s plenty. Plus, you have to be there early.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” says Kent, though what he means is that he’ll sleep in the waiting room of the Waterbury Planned Parenthood.

He walks through the small apartment, past the dining table and the piano, an upright that looks like it’s seen better days. If only she’d move into a bigger place, Kent thinks, and he’d buy her a baby grand. She wouldn’t play it, just to spite him. The keyboard is shut and a collection of cats are sitting on it; he opens the back door and pokes his head out to find two others, plus an extra.

“Mother,” he calls, across the apartment. “There’s a strange cat outside.”

“Let it in,” she says. “There’s plenty in here.”

“But—”

She pokes her head out, to get a glimpse of the interloper as he runs into the apartment. “Oh, that one,” she says, appraising the skinny black cat. “He’s been by before. Must be someone’s—he’s okay. Seems well-kept. Likes a little venison, I guess.”

“I guess,” is all Kent can manage. It’s not even 7. He is tired. He does have to be up early.

On the old twin in his bedroom, he calls his sister. They shared this room; it doesn’t feel right that she’s not there. They haven’t squashed into the same bed for decades, but that’s how it is—these things imprint on you until you’re a fifty-something man and you lie awake in bed with a cat kicking up litter five feet from your face and you think, I should call Brigid.

“She’s insane,” he says, no preamble necessary. “She’s letting strays into the house now. She’s been using the same thing of Comet for going on a decade now, I think. She made me _Jell-O_.”

“Mom loves Jell-O,” she says. After Kent doesn’t reply, she adds, “What, you were just calling to bitch?”

“Basically.” His sister snorts at that. “No, actually, should we worry? I’m being serious, I’m seriously asking. Aren’t you worried?”

“I feel like you _want_ me to be worried, but, I’m not. She gets around, man.”

“ _Does_ she get around, or do you just use that website to buy her groceries?”

“Just because she doesn’t like supermarkets doesn’t mean she can’t get around. She gets where she wants to.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, “like to the Shipwright, with Hollis.”

“Who or what the fuck?”

“It’s a bar, Brigid.”

“Pardon my lack of knowledge concerning the various drinking establishments of Syracuse and their noble patrons. I’m sure it’s a decent place. What the fuck are you doing down there, anyway?”

“Stepfathering my ass off,” he says. “But don’t you dare tell anyone.”

“Wouldn’t want people to think you were decent.”

“Wouldn’t want people to think other people _weren’t_.”

“Okay,” she says. “That’s vague. Well, if you won’t elaborate…”

“I’ll elaborate on something else if you want juicy details but aren’t picky what they’re concerning.”

“If it’s hockey gossip, I’m not interested.”

“Only in the most basic sense.” He pauses to think for a moment and a spray of litter splashes out across the bedroom: that stray cat is glaring. It yowls, and Kent clicks his tongue. “Come here,” he says.

“Is it the sort-of calico one?” Brigid asks. “She’s as sweet as sugar. She’ll get in your lap. Mom said she found that one at the no-kill on Darlington. I’d kill for a long-haired calico.”

“Well, no need to kill, because if Mom breaks her neck coming up the stairs you can have this one. But, no, it’s that stray. He’s looking at me ... and, he’s out. Welp. See what I mean, though? I don’t think strays should be using the box. Like, if he wants some dinner, whatever, I used to be young and hungry. But if Mom really wants him, fuck, she needs to at least make sure he’s vaccinated—and then she’ll have _six cats_ which, holy shit, Brigid, that’s a lot.”

She sighs. Kent can hear her cat now, in the distance. She’s shushing him, and shuffling around, and then the cat is clearly right up by the phone, and Brigid says, “Did you have some gossip for me? I’m not trying to rush you, but I’m meeting someone for dinner, so I’m trying to get out of here.”

“A guy?” Kent asks.

She sighs again, deeper. “No, a colleague who’s in town, I mean, he is a guy, but—it doesn’t matter. It’s not like that. Just tell me what you want to tell me because the cat’s on my shoulders and I need to get him off me so I can find my velvet mules.” Kent can hear the cat on her shoulder, purring noisy into the phone.

“I got a marriage proposal,” he says, quickly. “Well, okay, have fun at dinner.”

“Wait!” she says. “From Jack?”

“No, Brigid, from the lonely lighthouse operator I’ve been having a years-long correspondence with—”

“Oh, I didn’t know you did that.”

“—yes, _of course_ I mean Jack.”

“Oh. Oh! Well, okay. That’s more personal news than gossip, I suppose, but good for you, Kenny. I’ll help you find a good tux, if that’s what you need.”

“Well, I haven’t exactly said yes.”

“Well, why not?” she sounds offended. “If these mules are in storage I’m going to be super pissed.”

He ignores that, because who cares about her stupid mules? He thinks they’re a kind of shoe, but it’s just a hunch. “Because, I don’t know.”

“Okay, I got em, they were in the guest bedroom closet.” He can hear the shoes fall to the floor, probably so she can slip them on her feet. “Look, I just—man, fuck, I’d bail on this dinner if I could.”

“You could. But, I have to go to sleep.”

“For all your worry about Mom,” she says, “you have to go to sleep at seven?”

“It’s almost eight. I have to drive down to Poughkeepsie in the morning. Have fun at dinner, Brig.”

It sounds as if his abrupt sign-off catches her off-guard, because she says, “Oh. Oh, okay, well. It’s a work thing, but. I’ll try.” She sighs. “Congrats, Kenny.”

“I didn’t do anything, so don’t congratulate me. I didn’t do anything, I just—held out.”

“Well,” she says, “that’s more than some people do. I’ll let you go.”

“Talk soon,” he says, hanging up. They should take a trip together, he thinks to himself, clutching the phone to breast. It’s warm from use, from his clammy hand. He might describe his mother as “cold,” had he to pick a descriptor, but she’s never been stingy on the heat. Of course, Kent pays for it. He’s practically sweating his own bad decisions.

Then he calls Jack.

“Cats are good,” Jack says quietly. “I played, I fed, I groomed, I scooped.”

“What’d you do for yourself?” Kent asks.

“I have the Leafs game on,” he says. “It’s a bloodbath. You watching?”

Kent could, on his phone. “No, I’ve been here three hours, and my mother’s fed me, put me to work, and put me to bed.” He reaches over, twists the lamp out. It has an old-fashioned compact fluorescent in it, evidence of what little use it gets. The room isn’t sleep-dark, not like the Canadian wilderness: the door is cracked open so the cats can slip in and out to use the box, and the yellow light of the living room comes through in a slant. Then there’s the blinding-white of the sconce by the back door, which is merely dulled by the drab curtains. Kent has slept in less-pleasant circumstances, though: airplanes, buses, locker rooms, lovesick and startled.

Traveling, then sleeping without Jack is nothing new. Kent isn’t sure why this feels different now, suddenly. Is he at the precipice of losing that forever? Is he going to end up sleeping alone every night from now on?

Luckily, Jack’s quiet voice is there, coming through the speaker in as clear a diction as if they were in the same room, in the same bed: a bit mush-mouthed, that accent as thick as it gets. When he mutters to the cats, it’s in French. “Everyone all right?”

“We had Jell-O for dessert,” Kent says.

Jack laughs. “Magnifique,” he says. “Wow.”

“I know it’s trashy. Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of _you_ ,” Jack says.

“Don’t make fun of my mom. Only I can make fun of my mom.”

“I’m sure she’s doing her best.”

The thing is, Kent is not sure of that. “Well,” he says, drawing it out. “We’re all just doing our best, Zimms.” As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he thinks, I’m not sure Jack’s really doing his best, though, a lot of the time.

“There’s a cat on me,” Jack says, not really responding to the more general conversation Kent wants to have. “This pretty girl.”

“Baby,” Kent breathes. He pictures a Himalayan on Jack’s lap, looking up at him with fond eyes.

“Earlier I could have sworn she was looking for you, wandering around the bedroom and meowing, looking up kind of, like asking me to find you.”

Kent is stupidly touched. “Well, I’ll be back in a few days or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” Jack echoes. Abruptly, the din from the TV is muffled; he must have muted it.

“What’d you have for dinner?” Kent asks, because he’s been wondering.

“I ordered a pizza.”

Of course he did. “Oh, Jack. I left you dinner.”

“Well, you weren’t here,” he says, “so.”

“Was there a salad, at least?”

“There were some mixed greens,” Jack confirms.

“That does make me feel better. _Slightly_.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear it.” Then he switches to French: “How was the hotdish?”

Kent sticks with his first language: “Thanks for reminding me. It had tuna in it, did I tell you? That woman’s been making the same hotdish for fifty years. Maybe longer. I could swear she’s been using the same dish, too.”

“I like it with the beef,” Jack continues. “It’s not dissimilar from tourtière.”

“That,” Kent begins, fully braced by the irony, “is not a casserole. It’s a pie. You won’t catch me eating that, either. Remember that place in the Latin Quarter that cooked the beef in maple syrup? What was that?”

“I think that was a chef getting creative.” Then he’s back to English again: “It’s nice to have a little sweetness, you know?”

Kent scoffs. “I think that place closed, anyway. I feel like all we talk about is food.”

Jack is quiet. “It’s probably better that way.” Kent says nothing. “She’s, euh. Grooming me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She’s licking my arm hair.”

“Cats are gross,” Kent can hear one meowing at his mother back in the kitchen. “But they’re sweet when they aren’t being nasty.”

If Jack agrees, he doesn’t signal it. “Second period’s going to start,” he says.

“Well, then I’ll let you go, and I’m going to get to sleep.”

“Isn’t it early?”

“ _Moms_ ,” Kent explains, though what he’s thinking is, _your daughter_.

“Bonne nuit, then, I suppose.”

“Yeah. Same to you. Bonne nuit.”

Would a married couple say “I love you”? Kent wonders. Would they smooch into the phone? Would they say “I miss you” or “I wish you could have come”? Or would it feel less necessary, that you love and miss them a simple given? Could it just be, well, presumed?

The noise of the game returns before the call ends.

* * *

There she was, in a big pullover hoodie and yoga pants, her loose yellow curls in a high ponytail and her feet in leather flip-flops.

“Aren’t your feet cold?” Kent asked.

“I wanted to be comfortable,” she said. “These are comfortable.”

“Greer, it’s thirty-what degrees out.”

“I don’t care.” She sniffed. “Can we just go?”

No hello, and no thank you.

“Sure,” said Kent. He grabbed the door handle. “After you.”

* * *

Kent knows instantly he should have come the night before. Not for Greer, obviously; Greer doesn’t give a shit. But he feels weird, starting out like this, on a 90-minute drive to Waterbury. He isn’t tired; he’s done more tiring things on less sleep.

“You hungry?” he asked. “Do you want a coffee, or—”

“I can’t eat anything. Does this thing have seat warmers?”

“Yeah, here.” He leans over, pointing to a button on the dash, under the internet radio. Before he can push it, she shoves his hand away.

“I can do it myself.” She does.

“I haven’t eaten anything so I’m going to hit up a drive-through or something.”

She groans, and sinks down. Maybe she hasn’t slept much. Maybe this whole thing is just taxing for her, and Kent would understand that—but she should say something, right? She ought to say, “Listen, sorry if I’m a bitch, this whole thing is just…” She wouldn’t even have to finish the sentence. Then he would say, “Don’t worry about it,” and they would sit in companionable silence. But she doesn’t owe him an explanation, or anything.

“I at least need a coffee,” he adds.

“Whatever,” she says. “Do whatever, Kenny.”

“Great.” He passes her his phone. “Find a Starbucks, okay?”

She snatches it from his hands, and starts searching. “What is it with old people and driving directions?”

“Well, I’m not from around here, exactly. How should I know where there’s a Starbucks?”

“I guess,” she says, and she directs him to get off at a certain exit.

He gets the biggest possible coffee, and she again declines the offer to buy her anything. “You could have it later,” he says, “like a cookie or something?” She declines for the third time.

She looks—well, she doesn’t look pretty with that expression on her face, such a look of disdain and apprehension. Hockey players have a tendency to make bothered looks—maybe she picked it up from Bittle. Or is he too subtle? Greer sure looks like him: same color hair, same color eyes, same judgy little mouth, same particular posture: hip out, legs straight, arms always doing something that betrays the look on her face. There’s visible Jack in her, too; with her hair color, and despite the ample stack of her figure, she looks in certain lights like Alicia in her early thirties, roughly when she would have had Jack. Kent sees it sometimes in old pictures, and has for a while. It’s the bone structure, mostly. Greer is fluid like Bittle, though, while Alicia has always seemed to float. As she’s slowly shrunk with age she _still_ seems to glide, seemingly weightless. In the passenger seat of the Lexus, though, Greer is all weight, super heavy, from her tight brow to her hands in her lap. Her fingers are nimble, the nails long and metallic purple. That’s popular now; Jack would hate it. He has never remarked on how much of her figure comes from him.

Partway through the drive, she sits up and stretches. If she’s been asleep, Kent hasn’t noticed. He’s been consumed by uncertain quavering over how to handle things: if she hands him an uncomfortable silence, then all he’s fit to do is sit behind the wheel feeling uncomfortable, which in turn makes him want to hand her back this discomfort in the form of lousy truth. What kind of irresponsible slut gets pregnant? Kent has not had sex with a woman, but he spent many years surrounded by men who did, sometimes repeatedly with the same woman and sometimes with whichever woman or women happened to just be around and willing at the time. This left him with the impression that, on the whole, getting pregnant was not likely to just, out of the blue, happen; the likelihood of becoming pregnant was not, say, as sure as the likelihood of winning that night’s game, or even clinching a playoff berth. It must take real determination—real chutzpah. That’s a word he heard someone use once. He wants to ask her how she could just let this happen.

Before he can ask, she says, “How’s my dad?”

Kent nearly swallows his coffee oddly. He gets it into the cup holder without managing, somehow, to spill any. “He doesn’t know,” Kent says. “I didn’t tell him.”

“Great, because, you promised. But, no, is he like— _okay_?” When Kent isn’t quick to answer, she says, “You just made it sound like he was dying.”

“He’s more worried about you than you are about him,” is what Kent manages to come up with.

“Well, fine. So, he’s okay?”

“He probably won’t drop dead tomorrow,” Kent says, before deciding to upgrade Jack’s condition to, “I mean, his blood pressure is a big problem—you know his cardiologist wants him on meds, but he’s already taking so many meds, so we’re trying to get it down through just regular diet and whatever, but maybe you’re too young to know what that shit’s like.” She says nothing, just scrunches up tighter in her seat. “Anyway, I just think he’d appreciate hearing from you more often. Is what I meant.”

“I’m at school,” she says. “I’m doing stuff.”

“Well,” he sniffs. “I mean, _clearly_.”

“You know what? Don’t hassle me before this. Just don’t talk to me, okay?”

Kent is trying to empathize: to be a teenage girl, pregnant, scared, maybe feeling stupid, hungry and tired, stuck in a car with someone you don’t like very much, and about to undergo a medical procedure that will possibly cause violent cramping, and ruin at least two nice pairs of underwear.

Then again, Greer roped him into this, nay, _demanded_ his entry into it. So he doesn’t feel too bad for her, and considers saying so.

If he chooses to say nothing anyhow, well, he isn’t really sure why.

* * *

Kent grabs the coffee when he leaves the car, carrying it in one hand while he makes sure the doors are locked with the other. Regardless of technology, locking car doors is too much a part of his psyche to ever physically stop doing it. How do you just straight-up wander away from a car without using the fob to make sure it’s secure? Typical of the post-millennial she is, Greer doesn’t wait, just turns and saunters into the building. It’s only when she does it that Kent realizes they haven’t yet made eye contact.

Much of the coffee is left over. Kent takes a sip and it’s cold on his lips, almost curdled in flavor. So, fuck it. He slams it into the trashcan that sits outside the clinic. She certainly hasn’t waited for him, and through the glass doors, he can already see her bounding up to the reception desk.

“Hi,” she’s saying, as Kent walks through the door. “Checking in? I made an appointment. For Bittle?”

“First name?”

“Greer.” She pauses. “Middle name Zimmermann.”

“Birthday?”

Kent rests his hands on the counter.

Greer takes a half-step away. “April sixth,” she says. “Twenty-twenty-four.”

“All right, yep,” says the receptionist. It’s a man, which shouldn’t surprise Kent, but it does, because he was born in the early nineties and so, to him, men will never have a place behind a desk at a women’s health clinic, even if he knows that what a man is and what a woman is and what a women’s health clinic does are all different spectrums of many delightful potentials and that’s so great and he’s really happy for people. “Okay, we’ve got you. Right on time. Just take a seat.” With a stylus, he gestures to the waiting area, which seems professional-uncomfortable, not unlike the vast majority of office waiting rooms Kent has sat in.

Then, the receptionist reaches over the counter to hand her a tablet. “You’ll need this,” he says. “Just make sure all the information you gave us online is okay, and certify method of payment and liability, and there’s a privacy statement—”

“Oh, good,” Greer says.

“Just fill it out and hand it back and then we can get you started.”

“Great,” she says, “thanks!” with more warmth than she has shown to Kent for ten years, probably.

The thing is, Kent has been explicitly taught and had decades to hone his skills through applied practice. He knows how to flip a clever comment into the exchange at the right moment, or how to diffuse the tension in a Q-and-A, or how to give a non-answer that sounds like a dishy soundbite.

“Hand me your credit card,” she says.

No one prepared him to handle all the ways in which this particular situation is awkward and he’s coming off poorly. He’s never been an accessory before, at least, not since he was a child.

So, stupidly, he says, “Oh, okay,” and digs it out of his pocket, where it’s been nesting with his passport, insurance, and IDs.

“Thanks,” she says, tapping in the numbers.

It’s the first “thanks” of the day from her, and he doesn’t want her to think she hasn’t noticed. “You’re welcome,” he says. “I mean, this has gotta be—”

“Almost done.” She gets up, carries the tablet to the desk, exchanges words with the receptionist briefly, and then retreats. She joins Kent again, sits, and says nothing. Light music is playing; Kent knows that he knows it, but he can’t identify it at all, like most celebrities’ faces. Like anything pop-cultural that happened after he turned forty or forty-five. Before Greer graduated high school and stopped ice dancing, Kent would go with Jack to see her routines sometimes and think, jesus, what is this music? Bittle was such an asshole about it: Oh, it’s this thing we love, it’s the hottest track on whatever album. Kent’s mother was in her teens and twenties in the 1980s, so she must have heard hair metal or New Wave at _some_ point, but all she ever plays on the piano is Broadway, spirituals, Baroque, and Christmas music, year-round. They must not have had the radio in North Dakota, and Kent cannot fathom having a parent who utters the words “hottest track” with nothing but self-indulgent sincerity. Kent likes Christmas music as much as anyone, but, for his birthday? “It’s your favorite song,” she’d say, launching into “Feliz Navidad” before Kent and whichever members of his current hockey team weren’t away for the holiday all took their bowls of Jell-O outside to burn sparklers. Karan took those right away when she realized Kent was going to need his hands to make money at some point, which raised the question of what the hell she thought he was going to do for a living before some coach told her about the CHL and how it paid, albeit basically nothing. Maybe she thought he would suck dicks, or make money on the competitive DDR circuit. He was good at that, at some point. Maybe she didn’t give a shit. Maybe she thought he’d just leave and she shouldn’t have to think about it. Self-fulfilling prophecy, seemingly.

It’s not long before a woman in scrubs approaches, and asks, “Greer?”

“Yeah.” Greer sits up straight, smiling.

“You have that paperwork for me?” She takes the pad, and begins to scroll through it. It takes her a moment, and she looks up. “You’ll be sedated for the procedure so you’ll need someone to drive you as soon as you’re cleared to leave the recovery room.”

Greer says, “That’s him,” and sort of nudges Kent with her shoulder.

Now the nurse addresses Kent. “You’re going to make sure Greer gets home okay?”

“Yeah,” Kent says.

She turns back to her tablet finger hovering over what must be the keyboard. “What’s your relationship?”

“My dad’s boyfriend,” Greer says, at the same time Kent answers, “I’m her stepfather.”

The nurse gets a little smile on her face. “We’ll just say ‘friend.’ ”

“That’s not accurate,” Greer insists. “He isn’t my friend.”

“For fuck’s sake,” says Kent. He is trying to be patient. He is trying to be kind. This isn’t _his_ uncomfortable situation; he’s not undergoing a socially awkward medical procedure. He is trying to understand what this might be like for her, feeling alone and maybe stupid, afraid of judgment and pain, missing school or whatever. But, come on. “Just say ‘friend’ so you can get your thing done.”

“My thing done,” she repeats. “All right, whatever. He’s my ‘friend.’ ” She makes little quotes with her fingers.

The nurse is apparently tapping in F-R-I-etc. as Kent thinks to himself, who agrees to drive you home after an abortion if not a friend? He’s come from another country, he’s eaten hotdish, he’s lying—well, okay, he’s selectively not telling Jack about his true purpose, leaving town. He’s abandoned his cats and his ethics and to his utter disappointment there are arms on the chairs in this waiting area so he can’t even take a nap.

“Good luck,” he tells her, before he heads back with the nurse. “You’re gonna be fine.”

She rolls her eyes. “I know.”

It’s not until she’s gone, and Kent is alone with only his phone and the clinic’s tablets full of magazines to distract him, that he thinks of how any biological offspring of Greer’s would be part Jack, too, by definition. Kent can’t help but feel a bit sad at the thought.


	3. iii

Abortions don’t take too long—twenty, thirty minutes. It varies, of course, by the type of procedure. Kent knows because he has read the “what to expect from your abortion” pamphlets in the waiting room several times over when a nurse approaches him and informs him that he can go see Greer in the recovery room if he likes, and she’s okay to leave when she feels comfortable.

Kent thanks the nurse, gets up, and regrets how long he’s spent doing this—rereading the same pamphlets, that is. He doesn’t regret helping Greer. What else would he be doing? Jack had texted him, “Good morning,” and sent a shot of the oats he ate for breakfast. Kent will never admit to Jack that he gets tired of overnight oats, but they’re straightforward to make and fairly easy to add onto, which is nice when you eat them every day, which Kent does because they’re an impactful source of nutrients, for the calories. That’s how he’s been trained to think about eating. Lately he likes to throw in some blueberries. He doesn’t know what else to eat.

“Morning,” Kent texts back.

Jack must be sitting there with his phone at the kitchen counter because he asks, “How’s your mom today?”

“She’s a bitch,” Kent writes. “But, you know, fine.” It isn’t a lie because he did see her in the morning—just, hours ago. She is a bitch. And she is fine.

“Going to dinner at my parents’ tonight,” Jack writes back.

So Kent asks, “Sleeping over?”

“Don’t know,” Jack says. “Thinking about it.” Kent shrugs as he reads this message, because whatever Jack does, it doesn’t impact him either way, since he’s not there. Jack follows up, though: “Only so much time for this stuff.”

“Pretty maudlin,” Kent writes.

“Tell your mom hi for me,” Jack replies, probably trying to be a bitch and, as usual, not really achieving it in the dimension that he’d hoped.

“I already did.” Kent gets up and holds his phone in his hand, staring at the screen. It would be so easy: “She doesn’t like you.” Instead, Kent says nothing, putting his phone in his jacket pocket. He never took his coat off, but then, like most offices and other high-energy-expenditure buildings, it’s a little too cold inside, even as rain is slicking the windows. Kent decides to go back to see Greer.

She’s just sitting in bed, looking at her phone. Kent’s not sure what he was expecting: agony, relief, some kind of expression. Instead, she looks up and her face is mostly blank. Weirdly, no one else is in the room.

“Kick me out if you want,” Kent says, pulling over a chair.

She puts her phone down. “That’s okay. I told them it was fine. I already put my clothes back on.”

“Okay.” Fuck, it’s hard. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like, physically or—”

“Either way,” Kent says. “Both?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Fine?”

Kent doesn’t know what to do with that, so he says, “Well, we can go when you want, or I can go back out there—?”

“It’s fine,” she says, that seemingly that key word. “Just, let me finish this.” Right, the phone. “I’m texting my dad.” She pauses, and clarifies, “Uh. Bitty.”

Kent swallows. “You text him a lot?”

She’s not looking at Kent, but rather, the screen. “I’m not texting him about this,” she says. “We just always text each other good morning. He’s probably getting up now.”

Makes sense—it’s roughly getting-up time all the way over in California.

“You miss him?”

Greer gives him a funny look. “You miss your dad?” she asks. Then, before Kent can even answer, she jerks back with shock and says, “Oh, shit, sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Sweetie,” he says, “it’s fine.” He gets up, and pushes the chair back to where he got it. So much for whatever he thought was going to happen when he came back here. “Finish texting Bittle and meet me out there when you’re ready, okay? We can get something to eat, or go back to the hotel—”

“What hotel?” she asks.

“The hotel where I got rooms because I wasn’t going to leave you randomly.”

“How long are you staying?”

“As long as you want,” he says, “though my plan was to stay the night.”

“Oh, okay. Well, just let me—”

“I’ll be out there,” Kent says, and he leaves the room.

* * *

It’s silent on the drive back to Poughkeepsie, afternoon now, and Kent tries to admire the foliage and ignore what he said to Greer before about her being shit about clandestine stuff: good, quite frankly. He’s relieved for her. Kent himself is adept at it, an expert. Something about that makes him sad and he doesn’t know why. It’s a skill, a fucking merit badge, a well-earned prize at the end of the hide-and-seek game that’s been most of his life. No one ever found him, did they? He’s still here, isn’t he? He didn’t lose. You get good at something if you practice enough. He survived, for fuck’s sake. He fucking won, and he is standing on his own two legs to prove it—or, well, driving, in this case, back to Poughkeepsie. Traffic’s a little worse now, but it’s not so bad.

When they’re not too far from town, Greer asks, “What’s the plan here?”

So he explains about the hotel: technically it’s not in town but across the river, and technically it’s not a hotel but a nice-looking inn. It wasn’t cheap, but they have a little gym, which Kent requires, and a hot tub, which he prefers. They can eat dinner in-room, if they want that, so nobody has to see them together, if she doesn’t want to be seen.

“Is there a pool?” she asks. “If it’s indoors I’ll get my suit.”

“Should you be swimming?”

She’s quiet, says nothing, hunches a little.

“I read every pamphlet in that waiting room,” he tells her. “I’m one practical away from being a full-on abortionist.”

“What a stupid thing to say,” she replies, and Kent can’t argue with it. But also, what a stupid thing to do, what a stupid favor to ask, what a thankless thing it is, dealing with children. He’s glad he never had any, he realizes, not for the first time.

He imagines Jack saying something like, “It’s different when they’re yours,” and Kent is sure that’s right—it must be different. It’s probably worse. When it’s your kid who’s a fucking moron.

Out of nowhere, she asks him, “Did you ever go to summer camp?”

“No,” he says quickly, and then: “I mean, I went to like, prospect camps. Maybe it’s the same.”

“Did they put you up in bunks?” she asks. “You know, like, cabins?”

“No, nothing like that. They put you in hotels, by the time you get up to professional. I don’t think this inn is going to be like a summer camp, if that’s what you’re wondering. I think it’ll be more like a hotel.”

“That wasn’t what I was wondering. I was just thinking, college is kind of like summer camp. This just kind of reminds me of like, sneaking back into my bunk after lights-out.”

As he pulls up in front of her dorm, Kent turns to ask her, “You were sneaking out of your cabin?”

“Yeah, all the cool kids did.”

“You were one of the cool kids?”

“Yes?” She seems insulted that he even has to ask. “Not so much at school, but, yeah, at summer camp. I was athletic so I could do all the shit, like, I could paddle a canoe. And my pies were the only ones that came out good in outdoor cooking.”

“You made fucking pies at summer camp,” Kent says, and it’s pathetic how incredulous he sounds.

“Yeah, but not like real ones, these little hand pies,” she explains. “We’d have to make dough out of flour and water, maybe some oil and shortening or something. Everyone else would fuck up by putting in too much stuff and they’d all ooze out in the fire, or they’d fuck up by not getting the close right, but I knew that galette-type fold, right, not to mention how to do a twist, so everyone would compete to have me do theirs. They’d all suck up to me by asking me to sit with them at lunch, or at sing-alongs, or whatever. And everyone knew I knew how to sneak in and out of the buildings, or I guess, ‘knew how’ is the wrong way to put it—I could do it because I had upper-body strength, so I could hoist myself up through the windows. Plus I could row, so people wanted me in their canoe or their rowboat on overnighters, because they knew I could do most of the work, and I did all that horsey stuff so I could ride and they let me go to the stables before roll in the morning to feed the horses.”

“I was never popular,” is all Kent can really say. They shouldn’t sit here in the car in front of her dorm—but Greer seems to be having a moment, so he’s not going to force her to go pack her bag.

“Why weren’t you popular?” she asks.

“Um. Well.” The thing is, Kent has never really thought about it, and it’s a very long time ago now—who gives a shit, honestly? “I wasn’t necessarily unpopular, I mean, I got invited to birthday parties, if that’s a good metric. Just, I guess, I wasn’t outgoing.”

“You weren’t?”

“No,” he says. “Not that I thought about it this way before a certain point, but I guess I had crushes on all these boys, so it was kind of like, don’t draw attention to yourself. Except in sports, I was good at those, too. I was really into basketball.”

“Not hockey?”

“Well, everyone skated, I mean, Western New York, everyone had a pair of skates. My mom didn’t want to buy me any because she felt it was a waste of money, but one kid, I guess he was from a rich family, his older brother sold me a pair for five bucks or ten bucks or something that sounded like a lot at the time. At that point, maybe they don’t do this anymore, they’d flood the baseball diamonds at any given park and you’d just go down there and skate around. I mean, literally all day, we’re talking like ninety-seven, ninety-eight, you’d spend your whole fucking day at the park just kind of messing around or fucking around playing hockey. But I saw the Nagano Olympics and wanted to be a speed skater, because I was very fast.”

“So why didn’t you become a speed skater?”

“Because my mother wouldn’t pay for speed-skating lessons,” Kent says, “and because I had this huge crush on a kid and he was a hockey player, so I just wanted to play hockey so we’d have this thing in common. I didn’t know it was a crush, it was just like, wow, that’s a cool guy, what if he thought I was also cool if we played hockey together?”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“My mom bought me hockey gear for my ninth birthday, like, second-hand, really shitty stuff, and I guess she also paid the team participation fee, I dunno, maybe that was for Christmas. But I was good enough that every time she wanted to pull me out and stop paying for it, not to mention buying me new equipment, the coach or someone would be like, don’t pull your kid out of this, lady, he’s good at it.”

“Did you like it?”

Kent barely understands the question. “I was good at it,” he says.

“You like getting attention?”

“Well, yeah,” Kent answers. “Of course, I mean. For the right things.”

“I wasn’t popular at school,” Greer says, seemingly going back to that conversation. “I think in LA, at private school, the things I was good at were nothing special, like, everyone had their little things, and there were other celeb kids in my grade so I think people were just kind of like, well, here’s this stuck-up bitch with the weird dads.”

“Were people, like, okay about that?”

“Yeah, mostly. Boys mostly wanted to hang out with me because they were pretty into hockey—a lot of guys would suck up to me and ask me if I could get them Kent Parson’s autograph.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks. “Was Kent Parson amenable to that?”

“I mostly didn’t ask,” she said. “It was kind of weird for me, like, he wasn’t _my_ dad, you know, maybe if I’d been more into boys. I just felt wrong asking.”

“People didn’t want Jack’s autograph?”

She rolls her eyes at that. “I think that’s really more of an East Coast thing.” She shakes her head. “I hate hockey, Kenny. I fucking hate it.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “I mean, I hate it sometimes, too.”

“At least you got to choose it.”

“Sort of, I mean, I guess?”

“Mostly,” she says, leaning over to unbuckle her seatbelt. “Okay, I’m gonna do this. Give me like, I dunno, twenty.”

“Whatever you need,” he says. “Or like, I’ll go get another coffee, and text me when you’re ready?”

“Sounds fine.” She opens the door, gives him a helpless look, and gets out of the car.

Kent watches her stagger into her dorm. For some reason, though not necessarily for good reason, every step hurts him, too.

* * *

I don’t really hate hockey, he tells himself, looking at his eyes in the mirror that hangs over the steering wheel. Why’d I say I hated hockey? I hate not getting my way. I hate losing. But I’m as good at hockey as anyone really ever could be; I didn’t lose very much, all things considered, much less than most people. I went first. I didn’t even want to, it didn’t even matter that much to me, and I still did. What’s to hate about that?

* * *

Greer is longer than twenty minutes; her packing spills into thirty, forty. At an hour, she texts Kent: “Okay, ready.” He is sitting on a stool at another Starbucks, this one in town, his car stashed up the road as he hunches over the New York Times (a real paper copy; they don’t print them north of the border anymore), his black coffee, and a “protein box” that contains mixed-nut butter, an egg, apple slices, white cheddar in red wax, a multi-grain husk of pita, and a plastic cup of hummus. He’s been picking at this and nibbling at that, sending praise to Jack for texting such well-lighted pictures of their cats being little shits by lounging in the bathtub.

“Make sure you vacuum all the hair up,” Kent tells him, because if he doesn’t Jack won’t.

“What hair?” Jack inquires.

“Cat hair,” Kent says. “So it doesn’t go down the drain, and clog the tub.”

“It’s not that much hair…”

“Just wipe it up!” Kent texts. “Just do it! It’s so much easier to just do it than it is to argue with me about it over text.” He gets up, dumping the rest of the food in the trash. Wasting things still bothers him, and there’s a girl about eighteen or nineteen outside the door asking for change. She might have liked mixed-nut butter, or something. Don’t worry about it, Kent thinks, you can’t do everything for everyone.

He feels, walking back to his car, that he should do more for certain people.

* * *

Discretion is a virtue. You want to pay off the staff at the inn, the desk clerk, the bell hop—but if you pay them off, they think you’ve got something to hide. Celebrity, Kent thinks as he’s pocketing two key cards, is so amorphous. You go to a sports bar in Anchorage while you’re waiting to embark on your damn cruise, and no one bats an eye at you. You go to a fancy hotel in Quebec City and five-year-olds—wait, how old was that kid, five? Ten? Whatever, you go, and kids are coming up to you, they’re asking for your autograph. You check into an inn across the river from Vassar College, and you’re thinking, well, here we are, it’s the Hudson Valley, this is suspicious, everyone knows who I am, even if they don’t know who Greer is, but no one cares. No one fucking cares. You make an ass of yourself in a Columbus bathhouse and no one cares. You go out with your also-relatively known sister for drinks in Tribeca and no one cares. You step into a Whole Foods in fucking Silver Lake with Eric Fucking Bittle and he has to bribe some photographer or whoever to leave you alone. Celebrity is fickle, Kent thinks. One person’s idol means nothing to the next guy. Bittle’s done a pretty good job of keeping Greer’s face out of tabloids, as far as these things go—Kent is more worried that someone will catch him with what’s assumed to be a random nineteen-year-old blonde girl, and go from there. The less incriminating explanation, in that case, isn’t really much less incriminating, as far as he’s concerned.

So that’s why they basically do nothing but sit in their rooms.

* * *

“We have to talk,” Kent says, tossing her a room service menu.

Greer has curled up in the arm chair in the corner of her bedroom, her tablet on her thighs and her calves folded under her ass. “You don’t need to babysit me,” she says. “I’ve got Motrin, you know, the pain isn’t that bad. I’m smart enough to go to the ER or whatever if I start running a fever or, I dunno, spewing blood.”

“Sure,” he says. No, that sounds sarcastic. “I mean, vacuum up the front end, probably not the most pleasant, but I’m relatively assured you won’t start spewing blood.”

“That’s a cute way to put it.”

“I’m cute,” he tells her. “Pick something for dinner.”

She starts flipping through the menu, and he sits on the edge of the bed, across from her.

“It’s not that I don’t trust the professionals at the Planned Parenthood in Waterbury,” he says.

She looks up. “They seem fine,” she agrees.

“It’s that this whole thing is weird,” he continues. “You have friends, or I’m under the impression that you do, and you obviously have a party responsible for half of this mess, at least biologically speaking, so why—why me?”

Softly, she closes the menu, and sets it on the side table, and then her tablet on top of it. “Does it matter?”

“Kind of, I mean. I’m here, right?”

“I just knew you’d do it.”

“Okay, but you don’t even like me.”

It takes her a moment to say, “That’s not true.”

This surprises him, though it shouldn’t, because what else was she going to say? She’s too polite to have admitted, “You’re right, I don’t.”

“Well,” he says, “it’s not like you got pregnant to give me a reason to specifically come down here and hang out with you, right”—she scoffs at that, which, fine—“so I guess I’m just wondering what’s going on, like, are you okay? Do you—do you need help? You don’t even have to tell me, if something did happen, just, I can put you in touch with a lawyer, or I can probably beat someone up if that’s what’s necessary.” He pauses. “I mean it’s not like I made a career out of fighting but I’m reasonably assured that I could take some, like, college kid.”

Like the college sophomore she is, she rolls her eyes and tilts her head, whining, “Oh my god. Nothing ‘happened.’ I am fine. You did me a big favor, okay, I know that. Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“You have to talk to me.”

“I certainly do not.”

“No, you do,” Kent says, “that’s what you owe me.”

“We can talk when I’m in Quebec over New Year’s—”

“Greer, _no_. I drove all the way down here, like, to another country. You owe me a fucking explanation.”

“Well—women, or people with a uterus and ovaries rather, release an egg once every cycle, and if some sperm should happen to get near it—”

He interrupts her. He starts raising his voice: “You’re being purposely obtuse!”

“I just don’t know what you want from me!” she shouts back. “You’re looking for me to be like, yeah I got gangbanged, or something—well, I didn’t! I just fucked up, okay? You did me a solid, so thanks, and that’s it. That’s it! Sometimes things are what they are. Not everyone is hiding something!”

“You literally are,” he says, surprised by how calm he sounds, given how angry he just was.

“Um, no.”

“Then I’ve been lying to your dad for nothing?”

“Well—that’s not what I mean!”

“Then what do you mean?”

“My personal life is my business,” she says. “That’s what I mean. I don’t owe you an explanation of what goes on in my social life, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for you to ask.”

“Greer, Christ, I don’t want to hear about your sex life. I mean, I care about you, you know, so if you need someone to talk to about anything, minus the explicit details, I’m here to listen, I guess. But I did come all the way down here—” (“It’s not _that_ far,” she mumbles) “—on short notice—” (“You’re retired?”) “—and like, I know Jack feels like you’re being distant, though I suppose I acknowledge he’s not the most credible judge of these things. But you’re close with Bitty? So it just seems to me that something’s _wrong_ , or maybe just kind of, I don’t know, off?” Now that he’s taking a deliberate pause, she doesn’t say anything. So he continues, “I mean, I’d help you out any time, no sweat. The money doesn’t bother me. But I’m not really a part of your support system, or whatever, so…” He just trails off.

“My support system or whatever?” she gapes at him. “I just didn’t want to tell my dads.”

“Or your friends, or—I dunno, an RA, or like, an advisor or something?”

“Shoot,” she says. “I know you haven’t been to college, but, my advisor? That’s like—let’s say you had like AIDS or something.” She probably sees the face he’s making, because she corrects: “Okay, that’s a bad example. Let’s say you had a private issue in your personal life. Would you tell your coach?”

“Yeah,” he says, “that’s like, exactly who I’d tell. But the details would also be kind of important, which I think underscores my point, because it would be something like, is it the offseason? Or is it the freaking playoffs? Is there a game that night, is he going to have to like, rework all his damn lines? Plus it’s a team, so you can’t just like, carry around a big secret that impacts your play and not tell anybody, especially not me, since I’m the captain of the team, or I was, that stuff like—filters down to everyone. If I’m out for the game or the season or whatever and they have to scratch me, yes, that matters, I can’t just tell nobody and not show up to work. But, nor would I want to, because it’s my team, and I’d assume they’d support me, and vice versa. It’s a network of trust.”

“Oh, baloney,” she says. “It’s not the same.”

“No shit it’s not the same, but some of it’s applicable. I think the details are important, like, _why_ did you think I was the best person to do this when you have two perfectly good parents who aren’t me? Also, the part about the trust network is relevant. Do you feel like you can’t trust your dads? Did you think they maybe wouldn’t help you?”

“Of course I knew they’d help me. I just didn’t want to tell them.”

“But, why not?” Kent presses. “Seriously, why? Because they love you _so much_ , Greer.”

“I know they love me,” she grits out. “Some things are irrelevant to love, okay? I just didn’t want them to judge me.”

“They wouldn’t,” Kent says.

“Okay, well, listen. If you really want to know?” He nods, because he does. “I think you’re like, half right. My dad—Bitty would judge me. One-hundred-percent he would judge me.”

“Man, I don’t think—I mean, look, he’s not my favorite person literally ever, but he’s a gay dude who lives in Los Angeles, he went to a liberal arts college, he’s not going to be anti-abortion.”

“No, true,” she says, “he isn’t, but that’s a pretty limited look at it. He’s fine with things like abortion or premarital sex or like kids drinking or whatever when it’s an abstract concept. When it’s _me_? You think he wouldn’t judge? Oh my god, he’s from the _South_ , and with his like—” and here she adopts a full-on Georgia accent: “Your father and I fell in love when I was eighteen years old! I never even looked at another boy! Our first Valentine’s Day he sent me fifty-thousand roses!” She throws her hands up: “That boy!” It’s a credible Bittle impression.

“Do you ever think about how you don’t say the word _y’all_?”

“What?”

“Oh, just, that’s a good impression of him, and I thought kids grew up to kind of talk like their parents, so, do you think it’s weird that you didn’t pick up more Southernisms? … Okay, sorry, not the point, sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” She sighs, gets her legs out from under her body, seems to be adjusting—Kent tries not to think about the bleeding.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he says.

“Yeah, thanks. I’m not shy about that.” She crosses her legs. “So it’s not like—I know my dad wouldn’t disown me or like cut me off for needing an abortion. I know he wouldn’t say no and be like ‘that’s killing a baby, sorry, you can’t have one.’ But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be weird, and awkward, and change how he sees me. Because the fact is, you can make an honest mistake and people can think, at the same time, well, it’s just a mistake, she’s not a bad person, it happens, and something like, wow, what a dumb idiot, either she can’t control herself, or she’s too stupid to know how to use birth control, or she’s too weak to tell a guy no. There’s a lot of room in between ‘go fuck yourself, I hate you’ and no judgment. I guess I just don’t want to find out where on that sliding scale my dad would fall.”

Kent says nothing; he doesn’t owe her a confession. But he does think, as she’s talking: yeah, you’re right, I think of it that way.

She continues: “I know Jack wouldn’t judge me, but that doesn’t mean I’m thrilled to get his reaction, like, I know you guys are like—not _married_ or whatever, but, I’m not trying to say I hate him or anything like that. Just, he’s weird? He’s really fucking weird and I don’t—I don’t know what his goddamn reaction would be. Maybe he wouldn’t even have one.”

“I think, like with, um, Bitty, you might be selling him short, kind of? He’s gone through things in his life He fucked things up when he was your age, you know? So I think he might be more understanding than you’d think. Obviously I know Jack a lot better and like, listen, I’m certainly not suffering under any pretense that he’s not a weirdo, like, believe me, sweetie, I could tell you shit.”

“Shit I don’t want to hear?”

“I mean, I guess, but I meant more like, we go on nice vacations, right? And what does he want to do, he wants to like, get a behind-the-scenes tour of a commercial fishery, or find out about logging statistics. We once spent two weeks in France and all he wanted to do was hear about Roman fort development and World War Two battles.”

“That’s not weird,” she says. “That’s just having dorky interests. And like, no need to tell me, I know.”

“Well, it’s not _just_ the dorky interests,” Kent says. “It’s just the opaque way his brain works. Like, he takes thousands of pictures of one leaf that falls in our yard and he wants me to look at literally all of them, or he wears the same goddamn shirt all the time and it’s like a free shirt he got from his college alumni association or something.” Or he wants you to marry him, Kent thinks, but he can’t tell you why. “Between him and me and his parents he’s definitely in that topmost income bracket, so you’d think he could dress himself a little better, or at least get some help in that department, but he wears gym shorts and free t-shirts every day.”

“I think my dad used to take him pants shopping, so it’s probably just like, he doesn’t know how to buy a pair of pants.”

“God, does _that_ make sense. Yeah, your dad _would_ , wouldn’t he? Anyway.”

“But, you see what I’m talking about? I don’t know how he’d react if I told him I needed help getting an abortion. It would just be _so weird_ , Kenny. When I was a kid and I’d get upset about something he’d just try to like, pressure me into feeling better, and if I didn’t get with his _game plan_ or whatever he’d just be totally out of ideas. Like, you remember when you guys took me to Disney when I was like four—”

“You were six.”

“—and, ugh, that fucking cheese soup? I was a _child_ and I have nightmares about that soup. I have nightmares to this _day_ about that whole trip.”

“Do _not_ tell him that, Greer, you’ll probably kill him.”

“But, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You remember? How I was just like, ugh, this soup, and he was just like, so at a loss? It was like—he was like, if you don’t want to eat this soup we just have to get through it together, what if we dipped some bread into it? What if I put salt in it? What if it was in a different bowl? What if I poured it into a cup and you drank it? What if we got a souvenir cup from the Canada pavilion gift shop? I still have that cup, by the way, it’s at home, it’s all faded. It’s got a picture of Daisy Duck in a Mountie outfit on it.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I remember that.”

“Weird, right?”

“What, Jack? I mean, I don’t know, I don’t have kids so it’s like, fuck if I know how to get a six-year-old to eat soup.”

“I meant the design on the cup, but, okay. The thing is, my dad—I mean, Bitty—made all kinds of stuff for me when I was a kid. He’d just be like, hey, I’m trying a little, you try a little, you like it? And if I didn’t he’d just give me something else.”

“He ever make hotdish?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay. But the thing is, for me, it’s like, I didn’t like the soup? I was so freaked out, I was away from my dad, Florida is _hot_ , all those rides and lines and people are a lot to deal with for a kid, and any normal person would be like, this battle’s not worth fighting. But to him it was like, I dunno, if I didn’t shut up and eat the bowl of goddamn soup—”

“He was coaching you,” Kent says, “he was treating you like a rookie or something.”

“But the thing I’m saying is, who gives a shit? Why was he overinvested in me eating soup? Who cares?”

“Listen, that’s Jack’s MO. That’s how he operates. He needs to figure out how to get you to eat the soup or he’s going to see it as a failure.”

“Well, frankly, how annoying! Do you see how it would be weird to get him involved in having an abortion? How would he handle that? For all I know he’d be like, nope, we’re in it to win it, you have that baby, and then we’re gonna train it to be an Olympic gold medal-winner in some winter sport, probably.”

“Oh, jesus,” Kent says. “Sweetie, he would not.”

She is very quiet: “I, frankly, am not so sure.”

Kent sighs. He’s starting to get hungry now. Weren’t they going to order dinner? “You don’t have his accent down.”

“What?”

“You did a good Bittle impression, but you didn’t do a Zimms.”

“You mean, why can’t I do a French Canada accent?” She shrugs. “I dunno, I mean, he talks less, so, there’s that. I haven’t had as much exposure.”

“Fair enough,” says Kent. “You got an accent for me?”

“No,” she replies. “you don’t have an accent. I probably sound like a valley girl or something.”

“Little bit, little bit. But that’s kind of a generic teen accent, you know, all culture comes from the West Coast.”

“Oh, sure,” she says.

“Oh, sure, _sure_ ,” he repeats, in an affected voice. She blinks at him, trying to figure it out, and he says, “North Dakota. That’s my mom.”

“Yeah, it sounded kind of … Minneapolis.”

“It’s next door,” Kent says. “Swedish immigrant culture, up north there.”

“Now it’s sounding a little Canadian.”

He shrugs. “I’ve been up there, too.”

She sighs, head falling into her hands. “We gonna get dinner?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. She opens up the menu again, and he puts the order in with the front desk: he’ll have the salmon with wilted greens and quinoa pilaf; she asks for a cheeseburger and French fries.

She’s sitting quietly again when he hangs up the phone, looking at her tablet.

“Hotdish is a Homesteader thing,” he says.

She looks up. “What?”

“Hotdish, it’s a thing from Minnesota and some parts of North Dakota I guess. It’s a kind of casserole thing you make with meat and some kind of starch, maybe a vegetable, cheap sauces like canned soup, insofar as that counts as a sauce. My mom makes it and it’s like—ugh, you really don’t know how lucky you are that you grew up in a household where your parent knew how to cook.”

“Doesn’t sound that weird.”

“Maybe not. It’s not great, in actuality,” he says. “I hate it.”

“Boy, you just hate everything,” she remarks. “Hockey, hotdish. My dad, it sounds like.”

“I don’t hate him,” Kent says. “I mean, I hate Roman forts, that’s definitely true, and I hope if you ever end up taking trips with your boyfriend or your girlfriend or whoever it is you’re into, they don’t force you to march around French villages in ninety-degree heat listening to a lecture _in French_ , mind you, about Caesar’s war on the Gauls. But, I kind of love that? I knew a lot of guys in the NHL, right. I know a lot of guys in hockey, or just sports, generally. We’re all kind of … bros? Is that a term kids still use?”

She shrugs. “I know what it means but like—not really.”

“But just—man, nobody was like Jack, nobody ever. His weird bullshit, jesus, it drives me crazy, and if you live with someone for a decade or going on two decades, the shit they do that you start off thinking is kind of weird, but cute, it gets weird but frustrating. I never need to see another leaf picture, for example, and I don’t get—a lot, okay? There’s a lot I don’t get.” He puts his elbow on the nightstand, and rests his head on his fist. “But, holy shit, I love that guy. You could scour every professional league in North America and never find anyone like him. He loves you so much, Greer. You don’t even know.”

“You’re right, I don’t.”

“It’s weird love, I guess, but you mean more to him than anything, I promise. More than me, more than hockey. He’d destroy himself for you.”

“What does that even mean?” she asks. 

So he tells her a story.

* * *

Kent turned thirty-seven in Rhode Island, in a sleepy seaside town. Taylor had a mansion on the ocean with seemingly endless private beach (though it did end) and a party most summers with seemingly endless numbers of celebrities (though they all fit into one picture). The pretense was Kent’s birthday, though the real pretense was the Independence Day weekend, and the real cause for celebration, of course, was photo ops, or maybe the fragile reminder that fun and privilege went hand-in-hand. It was a late-youth summer, for Kent, his hip just beginning to burn after a particularly rigorous series, but in many ways it was a peak for him: his first summer with Jack again for the whole summer, it having become sort of serious. Kent had won a Messier, for whatever that was worth. Summers had always been good to them, sort of, until they weren’t. The summers, that was. Or just _them_. But that trip—that summer—felt different. Nothing ominous was looming over them then, or at least, nothing they were aware of.

Actually, the town wasn’t so sleepy; it was a little buzzy, a little trashy, and a little new-money. It reminded Kent of himself. He’d sort of loved it.

He loved the cold Atlantic, and ignored the way it stuck in his hip. He loved the opaque blanket of seafoam that gathered in the wake. He loved to see their feet sinking into sand together through the clear and glassy water right at the shore line, in the shallow beginnings of the private beach. They waded out and clung together like some homoerotic early-twentieth-century charcoal that would have been praised for glorifying the male form at the time but now, decades on, caused kids to pause in the American wing and shuffle their feet awkward and mutter, “Well, that’s gay.” They could be that painting, Kent had kept thinking, all throughout the trip. Hockey built a body into something slightly weirder than the ideal nineteen-tens male form, but, whatever, Kent thought. Jack’s hair stuck to his forehead by the sticky, drying saltwater. All ten of his fingers all rosy from days in the sun, for the first time, without that stupid ring on his finger, because he insisted on wearing it until the divorce was final. And now it was, and this was happening, and Kent had been really very happy and excited about it.

They took a boat that Jack rented across open ocean, all the way to Montauk. Kent hadn’t been so sure: “You know how to, like, drive one of these things?” It was a motor boat with seats in the front, big enough for a party. They bought bottled water and lemonade at the Stop and Shop before departing.

Jack had bragged, “Of course I know how to drive one of these things,” like it was a foregone conclusion—because his parents had money? Because he was Canadian? They got to Montauk and it was shitty, or at least, the marina was all shitty, the commercial fishing industry not what it used to be, despite Jack’s pointing out various bobbling lobster pots. “I knew a guy in lobster fishing,” he said. Of course he did. Sure, why not? They had lobster rolls and iced teas at some also-shitty counter-service place. They weren’t that good, the lobster rolls. Jack got an ice cream. Jack talked about sweet tea. “I’ll make it for you sometime,” he explained, though he never did, which Kent was fine with. “You stir in the sugar when the tea’s still hot, and then you chill it. When you’re in the South, at least around Atlanta, if you order an iced tea at any meal they ask you, ‘sweet or unsweet?’ Neat, eh?”

“It’s not neat,” Kent had said. “They ask you that at Starbucks.”

“That’s simple syrup they add to pre-made tea.”

“What literally is the difference? It’s just sugar in tea.”

Then Jack was annoyed again until they got back on the boat to jet back to Rhode Island. It wasn’t a long trip, about 80 minutes. “We could go faster,” Jack explained, “but the fuel restrictions mean we have to go slower.”

Kent omits:

“What’s the rush?” Kent had asked. He slid off the seat beside Jack and undid his pants slowly, so Jack would have enough time to tell him to back off. Jack said nothing, and let it happen. It wasn’t the time and place to go deep and get fancy—the boat would hit waves and buck up into the air, and Jack would mumble, “Shit, Kenny,” and grip the wheel more tightly, banking the boat slightly. It must have been a stupid thing to do, but Kent loved to do stupid things. Not that he thought they were stupid at the time, of course. He really thought himself somewhat crafty, a strategic mastermind.

Of course, he wasn’t, and then they got sloppy: for all it seemed that Jack was a bit prudish, and how he sometimes appeared as if he didn’t even like sex, the thrill of recklessness brought out some enthusiasm. Suddenly he was willing to kiss in public, or pose for pictures. He let Kent chat around the party with a drink in one hand and his other curled around Jack’s waist. Jack consented to being posted for Kent’s followers, in an image with head bowed over a chilled half-lobster, Jack prying open the claw. He had on a hat so his eyes were shielded, but that smirk was pretty telltale. He didn’t bother to dig out half the lobster, only the big part of the claw and the knuckles and the tail. There was all that stuff in the body, in the legs, but Jack didn’t need it. He could eat claw and tail meat every day if he wanted.

It wasn’t until they were driving away from their holiday and up to Providence that Jack became sullen.

After the omission, Kent ends the story here:

Out of Vacationland and back in the real world, Kent was beside himself to get a notification from his publicist that one of the party guests—a slightly exhibitionistic model who had been cool, sort of, five years prior, though she had begun rebranding herself as a wellness guru—has posted a picture of Kent and Jack kissing on a beach towel under the shade of an umbrella, Jack’s naked shoulders looking much redder than Kent had remembered them getting. The caption said, “so scorching that spf 50 don’t even do anything” and then there were three little lobster emojis. Strangely, when Kent first saw it, his reaction hasn’t been, “This is going to do irreparable damage to Jack’s or my reputation.” Instead, he’d sort of laughed at himself and the audacity of that bitch model, got back to his publicist, and said, “Jack is gonna be pissed that she called him a lobster. I mean, he’s not _that_ grabby.”

“Everyone knows your history,” she’s replied. “Are you guys in a relationship? Should we put out a statement?”

“I wasn’t ready,” Jack said, when Kent asked him. “This looks _so bad_.”

“We don’t have to say anything,” Kent said. “We can just say, our personal lives are our business.”

But then Jack, with his sanctimonious bullshit: “I can’t do that, Kenny. I don’t want to live a closed-off life. How else do I explain this to my daughter?”

“Well, she’s like two years old, so maybe don’t.”

“I can’t be like that. I can’t be secretive, and paranoid. That stuff makes me ill. She knows I’m famous. This divorce is already—it’s so much, Kenny.”

Kent could have made a lot of arguments about it—that it wasn’t secretive and paranoid, it was sensible and private. That their lives weren’t the public’s property, and weren’t for general entertainment. That no toddler knows what it really means to be famous. Not even Kent knew what it meant to be famous, and he had been famous for a while by that point.

So they put out a joint statement that said, “After enjoying a brief but formative connection while playing together as teenagers, we have become close again and have decided to explore a relationship,” please respect our families and our privacy and so on and so forth. Kent got a couple of questions about it during pressers: “What effect might this have on your game in two weeks against the Wild?”

“I’m a professional, Dave,” Kent had said in response, and that had gotten him a lot of good press: it was so snarky, his agitation so barely concealed. They played that clip over and over again for weeks. It was preseason still; nothing exciting had happened yet. People made graphics out of it: “I’m a professional, Dave.” “I’m a professional, Dave.” “I’m a professional, Dave.” The ironic thing was, Kent was on pretty good terms with Dave, insofar as he was on good terms with any member of the Las Vegas local news cabal.

Then the cheating rumors started swirling.

Then, Bitty announced that he was moving to Los Angeles. “That was always the goal,” he’d apparently explained. Jack returned from Georgia very upset. (A crying mess—omitted.) “He’s going to take my kid away from me,” Jack worried. “It’s already hard enough going down there to see them, but now I have to go to LA? I’ll never see her. This isn’t fair. She’s my daughter.”

“I’m sure you can get traded to, like, the Ducks,” Kent had suggested. “You’ll be closer to Vegas, for one thing. Two birds with one stone, and all that.”

“But I have two years left on this Minnesota contract,” Jack said. “We’re about to sweep preseason for the first time since twenty-nineteen. They’re never going to let me go.”

“And that’s great,” Kent said. “But, Zimms, you can work on getting closer to Greer some other way—you can’t stop Bittle from living his life.”

“I guess,” said Jack, and then less than a week later he had Bittle served with custody papers, which kept him from moving to California at all. By this point Kent had already been to Minneapolis, and Minnesota had won, though the Aces had been doing very well otherwise so Kent hadn’t really minded. Plus he had seen Jack and, well. (Omitted.) Clever of Jack, Kent thought, to wait until after that game to move forward with his hapless revenge plot, and shame on Jack’s lawyer, as far as Kent was concerned, for letting him do so at all.

“You don’t know,” Jack kept saying, when they fought about it on the phone. Their first major fight of their second relationship. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a father.” I don’t know what it’s like to have one, either, Kent thought to himself, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t see that you had a great one and didn’t really know it.

“It’s the deepest love,” Jack said at one point. “You feel every mile.” As if Kent didn’t know what longing felt like. Like he didn’t know loss. Like he didn’t know unrequited love.

“Is that what you think of me?” Kent wanted to ask.

Instead, Kent bit his tongue and let Jack catch himself in his own trap. Kent, for all his reservations, found himself trapped in the headlines; a woman dumped a glass of wine on Kent’s head while he was eating a post-game steak. At the end of it, Bittle moved with Greer to Los Angeles. Maybe it was regrettable, or for the best. Maybe it brought Jack closer, or maybe it killed whatever shore-light in Jack’s heart might have drawn him as near as possible to Kent, because what was guiding him now? Maybe nothing. Maybe it was regrettable to take Greer to the other side of the country, but at least she was raised by a man who wasn’t full of half-realized, vindictive pain. Bittle wasn’t cruel, either—he gave Jack full weeks to be Greer’s daddy.

That Christmas, Kent didn’t go home to see his mother. Instead he went to Montreal, and he taught Greer how to skate.

* * *

“Jesus,” Greer says, as soon as Kent finishes his story. “Taylor Swift? That’s so old-school.”

“Anyway,” Kent says, “some of the photos from that party got out, or posted somewhere, as photos do.”

“Photos,” she says, making air quotes.

“What would you call them?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. Pix? Or a picture? Photos are like, on paper.”

“Well, a photograph is just one kind of picture, right? A picture is just any kind of image.”

“No, it literally is something printed on paper, because you need the light, photo, to make it develop—photographic image, photograph, photo.”

See, this is—she’s just being difficult, is what this is. “You need light to take and see any picture, even a digital one that never actually exists as some kind of physical thing,” Kent rationalizes. “For the record, I mean, I’ve never owned a film camera that took pictures that I had to take to Target to get printed. Your dad’s the one who’s into that. Maybe he cares about the distinction, but I.” Kent just shrugs. “You know.”

“Why are you fighting with me?” she asks. “I’m a media studies major.”

He could scream at her, he’s so angry about this—he was trying to tell a story, not get all didactic or whatever about minutiae. But he doesn’t scream at her; he says, “Okay, point taken. _My_ point was more just, that’s what happened. I don’t know if that’s how _Bitty_ tells it.” He pauses. “I’m not fighting with you.”

“Bitty doesn’t tell it. He just says I can look it up online if I care. But I never did.”

“Well, now you don’t have to.”

“I don’t know what kind of version he has,” Greer says. “He’s always telling me to spend more time with my dad, or write e-mails to my dad, or call him, you know?”

“I mean, you ought to,” Kent says. “It would make him so fucking happy.”

She sighs, scrubbing her face. She looks up. “I know. I know. I feel guilty, sometimes. I know he’s paying for my college—”

He interrupts to say, “Well, that’s not causing him any hardships.”

“The thing is,” she continues, “You don’t fight a custody battle purely out of love. My dad—you know, Bitty—my dad would say something like, if you love something you do what’s best for it, if what’s best for it is letting it go.”

“Has he said that to you? Because, no offense, it sounds like something that would be printed on the side of a candle.”

“Not verbatim. But, man, I didn’t exactly enjoy going to Canada for Christmas, or whatever—there were things I liked about it?”

“Such as?”

“Maple syrup,” she says.

“Genuinely that is a terrible answer, sorry.”

“I was a kid, though. My dad didn’t put actual maple syrup on pancakes, just this fake stuff, so we never had it in the house, and the real kind is better, so, yeah, I found that pretty exciting. I guess I liked skating in the backyard at my grandparents’ because in LA you have to drive a freaking hour to get to a rink.”

“There is something dumbly romantic about skating outside.”

“More it was just like, oh, I can just go to the backyard. But it wasn’t so much Canada I didn’t like as just, the idea that I had to leave my dad and my friends and take this long flight and go through customs. I’d get super frustrated because it was like, I’d be so annoyed that my parents had inflicted this slightly more difficult situation on me. What I really wanted was to be in Georgia with my dad and my grandparents and my cousins baking pies and singing carols and midnight mass. And, sure, midnight mass sucks, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t enjoy it—but that was like, Christmas to me?”

“But it doesn’t even snow there during the winter,” Kent says. “What kind of Christmas is that?”

“I liked playing with the cats,” she says. “I always got a kick out of that.”

“Feel free to come and play with the cats anytime, if you’re not too good for that.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You know, you talk about this stuff with a lot of maturity,” Kent says. He’s continuing on with, “Have you ever done therapy?” as there’s a knock at the door.

“Am I getting the food?” she asks him.

“It’s your room.”

She gets up. “Yeah, I’ve done some therapy.” She pulls off her hoodie, and tosses it in the chair on her way to get the door.

* * *

At seven in the morning Kent is up; by twenty after he’s on the elliptical. Benefit of being a dude, as his sister is fond of reminding him: nothing to secure, no grooming to undertake. He doesn’t wear a shirt because he didn’t want to pack one. Hotel gyms, such as they are, are rarely too heavily trafficked.

He’s forty minutes into his circuit when Greer comes in. She waves at him, but Kent is shocked: he slams on the emergency stop; sweat is flung from his brow to the display. He’ll wipe it down later, maybe, because who cares, this is _insane_.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

She’s walking over to the treadmill, tablet under one arm and a cup of water in hand. “I’m gonna run,” she says, stepping onto the machine casually.

“What the fuck,” he says, not bothering to inflect it.

“Sorry I’m interrupting your workout, Mister Private Gym.”

“I don’t give a shit about that.” Where’s his fucking towel? He grabs it, loosely, and starts wiping the machine off. “You’re not supposed to be exercising.”

“But I feel fine?”

“I read all of those pamphlets—”

“And because you read some pamphlets in the Planned Parenthood waiting room you get to be an authority figure in my life now?”

  
“You don’t get it,” he says “Why don’t you get it? You don’t get the perks without the payment.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t get the good parts of parenting without the shitty parts! I’m not going to pay for your abortion and then just let you bleed out on a treadmill. I’m not going to be here for you if it’s only when you want me. Either you hate me and we don’t talk, or I’m someone you can rely on, but like, in this nebulous category where I’m not a parent but I’m not your buddy, either, I’m like—jeez, at the very least, how do you think I could ever look at Jack again if we ended up in the fucking ER?”

“Well, if I did, it wouldn’t be any of his business, would it?”

“I dunno, Greer, I think your dads would want to know if you did!”

“Oh, don’t even pretend you give a shit about Bitty now.”

“Well, I don’t care if he’s living his best life, exactly, but if I had to call him on the phone because I helped you get a secret abortion and then you ended up passing out from blood loss, I think, yeah, I’d love to help him avoid being on the receiving end of _that_ call.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sweetie, I get worried if one of my cats gets herself up on the high shelves in the living room, because it’s a million feet off the ground and like, they go up there, I know they know how to get down. But what if this time something happens? What if she misses the next shelf? And those are cats, Greer. They’re not even people.”

“What’s your point?”

Kent can’t help but scream: “I fucking empathize!”

All she says is, “Oh,” brief and quiet.

“Oh!” he shouts. “ _Oh_? I’ve known you since you were a goddamn baby! You’re not my kid, you’re not _my_ kid, I know that, you don’t even like me, but do you really think I want to see bad things happen to you! Do you really think if something bad did happen I’d just let it roll off me like, well, she’s not my kid? Fuck no!”

Her face gets like—well, okay, she’s crying.

He doesn’t dare touch her, so he crosses his arms. “You are loved by the people I love,” he says, feeling nearly out of breath. “It’s complicated. I didn’t have the best family situation growing up. I mean, ever, honestly, still don’t. It never stops hurting, okay? That shit will haunt you. It will _haunt_ you.”

Shakily, she manages to ask, “And that’s why I can’t use the treadmill?”

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s why you can’t get on the treadmill.”

“Okay,” she chokes out, full sob. “Thanks.” She turns and flees.

Kent could follow; he wants to follow. He takes a step forward, and a step back. Don’t, he tells himself, don’t, it’s not your place. You are going to get back on the elliptical, and finish the next third of your cardio, and then use these shitty hotel-gym free weights to do your best hotel-gym version of a delt press, because maybe it’s not shoulder day, but it’s always shoulder day somewhere, and bearing some weight on your shoulders will feel awesome right now, and then you’ll wipe down the equipment, and then you’ll take a shower, and then you’ll put on jeans and a flannel, and then you’ll go see if she’s okay.

* * *

“Room service breakfast?” he asks her when she opens the door.

She takes a step back, appraising. “You showered.”

“The wet hair gives it away.” He uncrosses his arms. “Can I come in?”

Sighing, she pulls the door open wider. “By all means.” She hasn’t changed at all, is still in her gear. It’s too cute: performance running tights, well-cut and patterned; a matching sports bra; a loose top to go over it that gathers in the right place, cinched to be flattering but designed for movement. She’s pulled her hair down and the tie is around her wrist, but her shoes are still on, and Kent knows running shoes. Greer, he can see, owns an expensive pair.

He’s grateful for this view not because she has a good figure, though she very well may, and objectively it certainly seems fine: it has been a very, very long time, on the order of decades, since Kent dug his eyes into a woman’s body and tried to extract an attraction from it. And, jesus, did he used to try, and sometimes he would pull something up to the surface: some hint, some promise, some teaser. His eyes like following the curves of Greer’s form, not the way they used to like to appraise men’s bodies (when allowed himself that) but because he recognizes some of Jack in her, and it’s clearer and sharper when she is wearing clothes that are fundamentally designed to make others think of her in her element, stark naked. She has thighs, and glutes—is bottom-heavy, as his mother or sister might say. He knows she is about the same height as Bittle, and Kent would never forget how she stood a few inches above her father when she wore heels to her high school graduation. It can be hard to reconcile it, sometimes: I have loved the body that made this body.

He hopes she hasn’t caught him staring, but she’s already reading the back of the card hanging from the doorknob, the one she didn’t use to order breakfast.

“Sorry about before,” he says, shutting the door behind him. 

She says nothing, just grunts.

“What are you going to get?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Continental breakfast? Eggs benedict? Pancakes? I shouldn’t get pancakes.”

“Why not?”

“I think my dad might be insulted.”

“I’m sure they have real syrup here.”

“I’ve got my own real syrup. First grocery run, I bought a whole jug of it, brought it back to my dorm.”

“You keep maple syrup in your dorm?”

“You never went to college, I guess.” She puts the menu down on the table and her ass in the chair. “That’s not exactly the weirdest thing people keep in their dorms.”

Kent picks up the menu; his options are pretty limited. He’ll have an egg-white omelet, add mushrooms and sundried tomatoes—hold the cheese, hold the toast. “I’ve seen what goes on inside college student places.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Not dorms—a couple of times I went to see your dad and I saw that frat house he lived in, with your dad and Brian Knight and those other guys—Adam whoever.”

“Adam Birkholtz,” she says. “Not that it matters.”

“We see him sometimes, if we go down to the city. New York City. He hangs out with my sister. Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I guess because they’re both middle-aged reasonably attractive, affluent people.”

“Oh. They—” she makes air quotes “— _hang out_.”

“Yeah, something like that. She hangs out with a lot of guys.”

Greer is quiet. “Wonder what that’s like?”

And Kent isn’t sure what to say about it—because, well, he is a guy. But, there’s something in the way she says it, some kind of hurt—it’s like he knows what she means. Kent has to be careful not to force anything, not to ask. “You know,” he says, the words feeling thick and hard to get out, “if you ever want to talk about stuff, you can, if you want. With me.”

“Thanks, Kenny.” She’s looking away, out the window, at the river through the nearly barren branches of the trees and shrubs that line its bank. The sight makes Kent miss his lake, and the way his cats sit patiently by the back windows, hoping for a glimpse of something wild to stir their imaginations. Greer sighs with her entire body in it, her shoulders dripping noticeably. She shakes some hair from her face. “I guess we should order breakfast.”

* * *

She does get the egg benedict, and Kent stares at it longingly. His therapist doesn’t think he has an eating disorder, and Kent doesn’t, either, but they agree that there’s something emotional about food that really bothers him, or bothers him increasingly the more time goes on. Living with Jack is hard; he can’t watch Jack eat without feeling like it’s something else Kent ought to be able to control. Jack allows it, until he doesn’t, and it’s a capsule history of their relationship. Anyway, it’s nice watching Greer eat.

“This food sucks,” she announces.

“It’s a hotel kitchen,” he tells her, like she ought to know what that means—but then, how many hotels has she ever stayed at? He asks her.

“Enough,” she figures, tossing it off breezily, smearing a fried potato though the leftover shine of hollandaise. “My dad is insulted if people don’t stay with us, but he’s not interested in staying with other people. He says he doesn’t want to impose.”

“You guys could come visit Montreal,” Kent is shocked to hear himself saying. “I mean, he could come, too. There’s no reason why he can’t come.”

And she grows contemplative, picking grapes and out-of-season blueberries from the wreck of soggy melon in her fruit cup. Her lips turn purple, slightly, until she licks it away. “I think that would be awkward, um.”

“That’s okay,” Kent agrees. “I don’t know where that idea came from.” Does he want Bittle in his house? Would he care? The thought of Bittle in their kitchen, judging, rolling his eyes at the pointless quality of so much of what they own: Le Creuset and Breville and All-Clad, good silicon spatulas and marble slabs and redundancies, so that Kent can serve pellets of raw cat food, broil chicken breasts, and roll out buns every Christmas, if indeed they even host Christmas that year. How much longer can it go on like this, Kent wonders, pretending toward cohesion? Pretending that things aren’t winding down, that they aren’t on a long slide toward the end? Bob and Alicia really shouldn’t drive anymore, and it’s not that often that Kent’s mother and Brigid can be talked into spending time in Canada. They have their own lives, even if insular, and their own ambitions, even if small. Who is Kent to deny his mother free deer carcass and a cheap beer at the Shipwright?

“What are your Thanksgiving plans?”

She bristles. She gets testy. “Uh, why?”

“Because Jack and I are doing it this year.”

“Yeah, my dad said.” She seems incredulous: “But, I mean—in _Canada_?”

“We usually go to my mother’s,” Kent explains, going over the whole situation, including the most important bit: “It would mean a lot to your dad.”

“I’m sure.” She’s dumped her fruit cup out on the coffee saucer, and is picking out the smashed blueberries. Kent can see, even from a distance, that they’re a little too fat, too round.

“Do you have plans yet?”

“Um. Well.” She hesitates. “In _theory_. The theory being that I’m supposed to go to Georgia, with my dad.”

When Kent senses a weakness, he pounces: “What makes that theoretical? You have a ticket yet?”

“Well—I mean. Yes, I have a ticket, but, I don’t really want to go to Georgia? For Thanksgiving, and for Christmas? It means I have to fly down there, fly back here, do my finals, pack everything, fly to California, fly from California a week later _back to Georgia_ , fly back to California, fly to Montreal, I haven’t decided if I want to fly back to LA or just go straight back to school after that. It’s such a gigantic pain in the ass to do all that traveling, but I also want to see my friends. Doesn’t sound relaxing to you, does it? Isn’t much of a break, is it?”

“Sweetie, I was in the Western Conference for twenty years. You ever been on a two-week roadie?” She shakes her head. “Just come to Montreal for Thanksgiving. It’ll be much easier.”

“Logistically, maybe, but try explaining that to my dad. He already bought my ticket.”

“Just change your ticket. We’ll pay”

“I would have to talk to my dad.”

“I can talk to him.”

“Kenny,” she says, “I highly doubt that would be very persuasive.”

It’s an invitation, to Kent, and he decides right then to take it as a challenge. “Okay,” he says, but what he means is that he can already see his own triumph: it would be so easy, he thinks, to talk Bittle into it. It would be so wonderful, he tells himself, to do this for Jack.

As for what he does for Greer:

He picks up the breakfast tray and leaves it outside of the door on his way back to his room. Checkout is noon; he’s given Greer the cash so she can pay the bill herself. Kent highly doubts anyone’s going to be checking his statements, other than his accountant, but all the same: best the fact that he paid for two rooms not be subject to scrutiny. She ought to take her time getting ready, he told her, she ought not rush and she ought not push herself. He will meet her back at the car at a quarter after noon, and he’ll take her to run some errands, or she can just head home. “It’s up to you,” he told her, and her face lit up like she wasn’t used to things being up to her.

Kent walks down to the Hudson River and he plants himself in the browning grass that lines its bank. Underfoot, the fallen leaves of mid-November are soft and mostly brown or browning green, not picturesque at all. The soil here is rich and feels pliant, like it isn’t such a bad place to grow a new identity, a new life. He thinks about Greer and her media studies degree and how set and yet unknowable his own life was at 19—he would stay on the Aces for two decades, feeling increasingly trapped in Vegas, even as he grew to love his team and, unexpectedly, himself. It’s easy for a person to see the good in himself in a place like Las Vegas. No one is from there, Kent learned; it’s a place people come to when they want to leave behind something else. Kent thinks his mistake was that when he was drafted to the Aces he’d assumed he had arrived, but you can only _arrive_ some place that exists, and Vegas is improbable, like a kind of mirage. Lake Brome would be there even if Jack and Kent weren’t, and that both worries and scares Kent sometimes. Other times it’s a comfort: if they died, if they left and didn’t come back, their cats would be all right, stalking prey in the forest and snatching fish that were stupid enough to swim up to the shallow bank.

Or maybe something larger, some bigger predator, would make a single meal out of his three cats. Either way, things would right themselves. He gets up and goes back to the Lexus, parked not too far from the entry to the inn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week I will be on a train, so I may hold off on posting the THRILLING CONCLUSION to this hot fic until two Sundays from now. Follow my Check, Please Tumblr for more updates, maybe. (Maybe?) It's [camilliar.tumblr.com](http://camilliar.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Thanks for reading this far!


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, hi, I slipped off my posting schedule -- train/holidays/work happened and I'm very sorry I let that prevent me from posting the conclusion to this. But, it's here now. Thanks to everyone who read through to this point.

Greer asks to be taken to Target, and Kent is relieved because it means he doesn’t have to drive back to Syracuse straight away. Those hours in the car, that short trip—it seems a lot longer and much less fun when he knows that what’s waiting for him on the other side is leftover hotdish. If there are surprises in store, he’s not sure he’s going to like them, whatever they turn out to be. More stray cats, probably. At least that is something Kent can handle.

“What do you need at Target?” Kent asks, knowing that he’ll buy it for her, whatever it is.

“Who said I wanted anything?” she sniffs, but then she relents and rattles off a list of things: “Granola bars, maybe protein bars—oh, you know what I wasn’t allowed to have when I was a kid?”

“What?” Kent is dying to know.

“Like, boxed macaroni and cheese.”

“I don’t know what kind of macaroni your father made, but I think it’s safe to assume you didn’t miss out on anything.”

“Maybe it’s not so much that I wasn’t allowed to have it,” she explains, “but that we just _didn’t_ have it? Anyway, it always looked so good when I’d see it in ads.”

“So you want me to buy you boxed macaroni and cheese?”

“Oh, thank you, no. It’s not good. Have you had it? It’s not good. It just _looks_ good. Like, in ads. My dad taught me all the tricks of how to take pictures of food—to use light and like framing and stuff. You can make almost anything look good, even things that are awful, but if you take a bad picture of something, it doesn’t matter how good it is, right?”

“That’s how it is with everything, not just food. Also, yes, of course I’ve had Kraft macaroni. First of all, I grew up with a single mother, and second of all, I spent a lot of high school in Canada. It pretty much wasn’t a postgame celebration if we didn’t make Kraft Dinner nearly blackout drunk at five in the morning.”

“Who, like, you and my dad?”

“Yeah,” Kent says. “Us, the team, whichever townie girls were creeping around. Guys from other teams. It wasn’t a shining example of healthy athlete lifestyle up there—in Rimouski, I mean, though I doubt the culture’s much different, or I doubt it was much different in the larger towns. Have you been to Rimouski?” Kent watches her shake her head. “Well, it’s a shithole. I mean, it’s fine for what it is? But it’s this like, half-industrial town, or it was, right on the river, but Canada’s so big that it felt like it was in a completely different country from, say, Montreal. Like you’re in a totally different province. And nobody gave a shit what we did, I mean, so long as we won.”

“Isn’t that kind of how it is with everything?”

Kent can’t tell if she’s mocking him or not, so he takes her at her word: “Juniors is a particularly extreme example. You _kill yourself_ training, practically, you’re 16 or 17 and you’re a professional athlete. There’s this insane scrutiny on you—it must seem like a billion years ago, but there was this whole internet economy of people speculating on various draft classes _years_ in advance. So long as you put that work in, and it pays off, and you win, no one cares what you do. No one cared what we did. So long as you don’t put a skate out of line you can basically live like a low-rent king. Girls, booze, macaroni, you know, whatever.” Because she doesn’t say anything, Kent figures it’s okay to keep going: “I was lucky to get in with your dad in a lot of ways, because he had like a car and his parents would come up and take us out to dinner, and Bob helped set me up with a good agent and a good trainer. Everything was a high, all the time, until it wasn’t. It was like two years of the most extreme versions of everything, and all of it in contrast to this shitty fucking town. Winning is like a drug, Greer. It’s like a motherfucking drug.”

“I know,” she says. “It was like that, with skating “

“Was it?”

“Oh, sure, yeah. Because people stop caring if you’re doing okay in any other regard once you’re a winner. I haven’t skated in two years.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I miss the physical action of skating, yeah, of course. I miss competing, but college is like competing, so whatever. I don’t miss the scrutiny you’re talking about—my dad.” She pauses. “Bitty. Bitty means well, right? And he is my best friend.” She drops into a southern accent: “Cross my heart, he is my best friend.” Then she lets it go: “But I got too tall and too big to do the jumps, like, by the time I was a junior in high school it was pretty obvious that my body was just not right to really go on and be a serious top-tier competitor in the world of ice dancing. And I was upset about it, and I think he was upset for me, and he used to say these things that didn’t help but I guess he thought they were helping. He used to be like, _well_ ,” accent, “ _you got your daddy’s ass._ ”

“Why would he think that would help?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was making an excuse like, hey, it’s not my ass, _I_ didn’t inadvertently tank your career. It’s more the height than the ass anyway, though every extra ounce is one more ounce you have to get off the ice. I’m still pissed you kicked me out of the gym this morning, by the way, like don’t think I’m not going to go back to working out tomorrow. I’m not even bleeding.”

“If I’m not here to stop you—you’re not bleeding? When I did this with my sister, it was like, terrifying, like a horror movie. Basically nonstop.”

“There’s a _tiny_ amount of spotting. But I think you’re just not used to seeing women bleed, probably—it’s not terrifying. It’s just a lot of uterine lining built up.”

“I have seen _a lot_ of blood in my line of work.”

“It’s different,” Greer says.

Kent notes, mentally, that she’s still in her gym clothes. “You shouldn’t kill yourself worrying about ounces. You are so fucking young.”

“I think only a dude would say that. Even if I know, logically, that you’re right. Only a guy would think that was a helpful thing to say.”

“Maybe it would be if everyone said it.”

“Get people to act it.”

“First you have to get people to say it.”

“Well, fuck, put that on the news, guy without college degree solves women’s body-image issues.”

Kent’s trying to figure out where to park in this Target lot—there’s a structure with covered spaces, but is that really necessary? It’s a Saturday, mid-day, and the place seems rather full. “I understand that it’s not the same,” he says, trying not to discredit her, but badly wanting to do so. It’s drizzling outside. “I’m not saying I know what it’s like to be a teenage girl.” Ah, there’s a space. “It must be hard. It must suck.”

“It’s mostly fine.”

“I’m not crazy enough to think that I can really understand what it’s like for you, I mean, case in point, the idea that you feel like you can’t tell the people who most care about you that you need their help—there’s all kinds of shit going on there, I get it, or I don’t get it, but I get that I don’t get it, like, look at me, I’m a guy, a bro if you will—”

“I wouldn’t.”

“—and I’m perfectly aware that being a white guy who’s a millionaire with a mansion full of hockey trophies is like, what do I know? I’m not saying that’s not the case. But I understand a couple of things.” He slides the car into park, presses the off button, unbuckles. “The way the world looks at you, and specifically at your body, when you’re a young athlete—I have been on the wrong side of that equation. I live with a man who was on the wrong side of that equation. When I was 14 and someone first said the words ‘major junior hockey’ to me I didn’t exactly have all the power in the room, if you see what I mean.”

“Yeah, and listen, I know you try to like, shut that stuff down.” She unbuckles her seatbelt, too. “Or you’re helping, or whatever.”

“Well, I’m certainly trying to. A lot of people really prefer things as they are—it doesn’t register that there are problems the NHL or just the sport needs to eradicate, or that things need to change, and those people are pretty hostile, and they react to me like, fuck, how’d this little—how’d this guy get in here, and why won’t he go away?

“Then you have problems on the other side of things where people fundamentally agree with you about the situation being fucked-up but they think the whole thing needs to be abolished and that supporting a system that supports violence in any capacity or has major paydays for white guys is just unfair, and it’s like, yes, by all means, let’s bring a more diverse group into this sport, into this _industry_ —but, fuck, there’s a difference between making it explicitly clear to someone that they’re at risk of brain injury and letting them make their own decision, and telling them they can’t play because of brain-injury risk and shutting the whole thing down. I like hockey. My whole thing is, I want to _save_ hockey. Professional sports that treat kids and minorities and gay people disposably don’t have _that_ much mileage in them, do they? I mean, look at what’s happened to football, if you think there’s not going to be some kind of revolt because it’s basically like a sport as an apartheid state ... you’re making a face at me like I’m insane.”

“No, no, I don’t think you’re insane,” she says. “You need to slow down a little, though, because I’m not your target audience. I don’t care about saving hockey, I mean, I hate hockey? Let hockey die, for all I care. Football, too. They’re not sports, Kenny, they’re just like, condoned ritual violence meant to placate people with miserable lives and probably pent-up homoerotic aggression.”

“Okay, _now_ you sound like a college sophomore.”

“But I’m _right_.”

“Okay, again, you don’t _not_ sound like a college sophomore. What do you know about homoerotic aggression?”

She looks at him like she’s crazy. “I’m the child of two gay hockey players?”

“And that would make you an authority compared to most people, but you can’t college-kid me on this one. I _am_ a gay hockey player.”

“I still hate hockey,” she says, clearly lacking a good rejoinder but wanting to get a word in anyhow.

“And I hate hotdish. Come on, let’s go shopping.”

* * *

Kent hasn’t been in a Target in years, not since Thanksgiving the year before last—or, was it the year before _that_?—when his mother insisted they line up after dinner to buy a self-cleaning cat box on sale. “We don’t need to get this on sale,” Kent tried to tell her, but it was more the spirit of the thing, the entertainment value of waiting in line and then shoving other people along in the pet aisle. Picking out the product was a whole thing itself—did she want a lavender box with gray accents, or a gray box with black accents? Gray, she finally decided, and they drove her home and set it up, Brigid kowtowing when their mother told her to turn off the radio, and Jack judging quietly, too drunk on turkey and potatoes to nag. They’d set the whole box up in the master bathroom, Jack helping to shake the litter in, Brigid drinking leftover wine from a glass clenched by fingers with a joint tucked between them. In her way, she’d been art directing. For a full year Kent would wonder, from time to time, if his mother’s cats used the box and if she wasn’t annoyed to hear the self-scooping mechanism combing the litter in the night. Was it noisier than kicking? Kent never got the chance to hear a cat use it.

“I threw that old thing out,” she told him, when he finally remembered to ask. “Made too much noise. Why you wanna get one?”

“No,” he’d said, and that had been the end of the matter, and also, that had been his most recent trip to Target.

Greer wanders the aisles wide-eyed and appreciative. The store is full of sparkly things, salty things, silky things—Greer is drawn to stacks of home décor and other useless dross. “A pin board shaped like a rainbow,” she says, marveling over it on the endcap to a short aisle. “This would look good by my desk.”

“I’ll get it for you,” Kent offers. “Go ahead and throw it in the cart.” She picks out boxes of 12 or 24 granola bars, all the same type; she seems to like chocolate with coconut, a flavor combination Kent himself does not like. She tears open a box and begins to eat one.

“We’re going to pay for it,” she explains while chewing, then she crumples the wrapper into her purse.

“By all means,” he tells her, despite the fact that as a kid he would have been mortified to open a product he hadn’t paid for. Bittle, he imagines, is one of those people who eats grapes out of the bag before purchase, ostensibly to taste them, as if he doesn’t know the flavor of green grapes, or can’t be assured of the predictability of industrial agriculture. Grapes taste the same everywhere, from Los Angeles to Poughkeepsie, and Greer chews her granola bar with detachment, staring at packages of pillowcases and neon-bodied table lamps. He wonders if Greer knows what he knows about her life, from serving as a vault for Jack’s complaints about the many childrearing decisions on which he was less a director than an executive producer. He did not want her to go to Vassar, for example, though he had only one countersuggestion and his disappointment hasn’t healed in two years. Jack’s view of things is that he has been treated primarily as a funding source, and while he admits that he’s never felt like Greer was _ungrateful_ , he’s also never felt like his opinions were given much weight. Kent supposes that’s frustrating but he hasn’t ever formed an opinion on whether it’s wrong, either, and his main reassurances to Jack have consisted of the rousing chorus of “that sucks, Zimms” and conciliatory handjobs.

Kent marvels at how much shit she piles into their cart, though she admittedly puts some back. A lot of thought goes into her selection process, and every so often she’s gracious enough to ask him if he prefers one color of glitter to another, or whether he prefers pine or spicy apple in the domain of mass-market candle scents: “Pine, I guess.” He shrugs, for emphasis.

“Right,” she says, throwing it into the cart, “right, Canada.”

“Let me guess—Bitty would get apple?”

“Dunno. He doesn’t buy scented candles. He makes his own potpourri.”

“And you don’t?”

“Well, when I say potpourri I of course mean the classy versions, lavender sachets and dried rosemary tied with a ribbon, that kind of thing.”

“Wouldn’t he give you some?”

“Oh, of course he has.” She helps herself to an apple candle, too. “But this is like, forbidden.” She inhales the scent through its packaging. “My middle-American dream, sort of. LA smells like—I dunno, I guess it smells like fried dough and the ocean. This is very New York state holiday festive. Right?”

“I mean, I guess. Canada smells like wet leaves.”

“What about really far up north, where it’s cold, like near the arctic? It probably doesn’t smell like anything up there.”

“Probably not,” Kent agrees, “but I’ve never been up there.”

“You could go,” she suggests.

“I guess I could, but I don’t need to. I’ve been as far north as Fairbanks, in Alaska. I’ve been to Finland, Sweden, a lot of those Scandinavian places. I’ve had a lot of friends from those places, you know, or maybe friends isn’t the right word—teammates. Hockey’s big there. I’ve been to—not for a while, clearly, but I’ve played a lot of places. Plus I’ve got a composite hip socket that tends to hurt when it gets cold out. So I steer clear of cold-weather situations when I can control it.”

“Does it hurt right now?”

“Now? Now, Christ, we’re in a Target.”

“Why’d you need a composite hip socket?”

“Sidney Crosby’s ass crushed it.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah, I mean. Him and everyone else, a thousand other guys other twenty-five years. Why do you think Bittle didn’t want you playing hockey?”

“I would assume he just made up some shit to get Jack to shut up, because I didn’t want to play and my dad was always really conscious of his feelings, poor guy. But I don’t think a thousand guys would have crushed me playing in like, some junior kids’ league. I guess my dad is lucky he never had any serious injuries.”

“He had injuries.”

“I guess he had concussions. But I mean, like, serious real injuries.”

“Those _are_ serious real injuries. He was out for almost an entire season at one point.”

“Oh really?” Greer asks. “When was that?”

“Oh god, probably, like, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe thirty.”

“When he was thirty?”

“No, in twenty-thirty. Maybe he had serious injuries when he was thirty, when he was with the Falcs, I don’t know, I was trying my absolute hardest not to pay attention. We weren’t exactly on amazing terms at every point.”

“Did you miss him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kent says. “If I ever didn’t, believe me, it was due to an excess of trying. Serious and deliberate avoidance. Do you, ever?”

It’s very telling that her lips get tight, and she makes a little _mmph_ noise, and that’s all she’s able to muster.

“I didn’t miss my dad, either,” Kent tries, “for very different reasons, obviously.”

“Why, what’d he do?”

“Does it matter? That’s in the past.”

“You said it haunted you.”

“Yeah, it haunts _me_ ,” Kent says. “No need to put that on other people. That’s advice I can give you, that, and get an IUD or something. Or, wait—use condoms. Yeah. Use condoms, and don’t let your shit intrude on your relationships with other people. Or get both, that sounds safe. Double protection.”

“Ew, no, don’t tell me what to use.”

He shrugs. “I’m just saying, if you surreptitiously put some in the cart, I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

“Oh my god, no, just no—”

“Why not, you want to have to do all this again?”

“It’s been better than I thought it would be, honestly.”

“That’s why I like to get into things thinking they’ll be crap,” he tells her. “If you get drafted first you end up on literally the NHL’s worst team. Keep your expectations low. If you make it into the playoffs that first season—maybe you get knocked out the first round, but you made it to the show, right? And then you got to take a little bow at the end of it.” He’s quiet. “I thought a lot about that show metaphor, over the years, about how comparing it to theater was, like.” He pauses. “Kinda gay.”

“I’m not touching that.” She drags the cart closer, looks in it. “Jesus, this is a lot of stuff.”

“I’m a realist.”

“Oh, me too,” she says. “I think it bothers my dad. I feel awful about that.”

“That’s the Jack in you.”

“What is, being a realist? Or feeling bad that something bothers my dad?”

“Both, sweetie. Very much both.”

“He feels awful about bothering Bitty?”

“He thinks he did something to ruin things, I guess, but he doesn’t know what it is. And I guess he’s right, he probably did. Don’t tell me, honestly, even if I’m dying to know.”

“Oh, but I don’t know,” she says. “Bitty tells me nothing about that. He’s not forthcoming about that sort of thing. Which is fine, I guess, and I always figured that it was something like, maybe he didn’t want me judging Jack too hard, if it was something Jack did. But, maybe it was something Bitty did, or maybe neither of them did anything. I didn’t think about it much. He’s dating someone now, though. He’s seeing, um. An architect. I hope he’s happy, you know? He always acts happy, so sometimes I can’t tell if he is, you know? Sometimes I wonder—can this new guy tell? Could Jack tell? Maybe Jack couldn’t tell and that’s what happened.” She sighs. “I dunno, Kenny.”

“I think moments where people are conscious of their own happiness are few and far between,” Kent tells her. “I mean, not because true happiness is rare, though it might be for some people. It’s more like, when you’re happy you’re not thinking about whether you are or not, you just exist in that moment unaware of how great it is. It’s really only later, or in my experience it’s always been later when I _wasn’t_ feeling so happy that I looked back and thought, yeah, that was great. I was happy then, I just didn’t know it.”

“But that’s terrible! I want to know I’m happy _now_.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Yeah.” She pauses. “I mean, insofar as happiness is really anything, and not just some constructed idea of, like, consumer placidity.”

Because Kent is not thinking, he says, “They make shirts with my face on them. I’m an action figure.”

And they grow quiet, and contemplative, while Greer painstakingly considers the wall of Christmas gift bags. It’s soon, Kent realizes. He _cannot_ think about it right now. Last year he got Jack a dozen framed pictures he’d taken of their back deck over the years, in various season and lights, at various times of day, before they rebuilt the dock and after. It had taken a lot of time to go through all of them, making Jack talk about which he liked and which he was proud of (“What’s the difference?”), not all at once but over the late summer and fall, surreptitiously snatching the CPNG files to have them professionally printed, delivering the little thumb drive like old-movie espionage, like the way they once traded pornography back in Rimouski, deciding to tell any busybodies it was tape—“Tape of dudes taking it up the ass,” Kent remembers quipping; he doesn’t remember if that bothered Jack or not—then picking out the frames in consultation with Brigid.

It’s not exactly in good taste, is it, to have pictures of one’s home displayed in one’s home? But Jack insisted they hang them in chronological order on the wall astride the back staircase, which leads down to the kitchen and which, prior, had been hung with framed jerseys. The Providence baby-blue didn’t really go with the décor, but the rest was perfectly unobjectionable. Kent’s taste ran to unadorned: clean lines, slightly midcentury, not fussy. Jack had virtually no opinions about interior style until he had the opportunity to fight about it, at which point he would default to some kind of lumberjack fantasia, a lot of exposed wood and flannel, but not the exposed wood in Kent’s fantasies, all bleached and skilled carpentry, like the lobby of a hotel in central Copenhagen. Jack liked things rough-hewn, pointlessly red with neutral colors, exposed, like a cross between a bordello and the hotel at Disney with the fake geyser. Kent had never seen the house in Providence that Bittle had decorated and then abandoned. Nothing much about it had stuck just from the pictures. Someday soon they’ll fight about where to re-hang those jerseys. Kent would auction them off if he could, but when he suggested that Jack had started crying.

It’s only once they’re in the next aisle that he realizes she’s given him a prize, a little treasure: Bittle is seeing an architect? Or, really, anyone—that he is, or that Greer knows, either way, is remarkable. That, Kent thinks, is a lance. I could wound with that. He thinks of Jack, crying about the jerseys.

For some reason, that’s when it unexpectedly pops out: “Your dad asked me to marry him.”

And Greer—Greer, to her credit, well, she doesn’t make a scene. She doesn’t do anything Kent might expect her to, which is to say, she doesn’t freak out and she doesn’t respond, really. She just takes a deep breath and, in a very even tone, asks, “Are you going to say yes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you, like, not want to?”

“I guess not,” Kent admits. “I don’t know, honestly. I never thought I’d get married, for various reasons, and now it’s many years down the line so it’s like, why? What would it change?” He searches her face for some answer, doesn’t find one. “Do you want to get married?”

“I’m still in the random weekend hook-ups part of my life. I thought that was pretty obvious? But, man, I dunno. Nineteen’s kinda—my dads waited until they were in their twenties, at least. And I guess that felt like it was kind of jumping the gun, huh? If it didn’t work out?”

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that, except to say that it’s probably not jumping the gun at this point.”

“So do it. Are you seriously asking me for advice?”

“Advice?” He scoffs. “Your blessing, maybe.”

Quiet, quiet. Of course, it’s never really quiet on a Saturday at Target: music overheard, kids shrieking.

“That’s not my blessing to give you,” she says, finally. “Do whatever you want.”

What Kent says in reply is, “That doesn’t usually work out for me,” though what he’s thinking is something more like, contrary to what it must seem from a distance I have not once in my life ever been permitted to do what I want, and I’m afraid that if I do it might disrupt the fragile stasis I find myself at least occasionally enjoying. Anyway, she rolls her eyes at him, so he asks, “Do you believe people have free will?”

Now she seems really annoyed, crossing her arms and huffing in the middle of the aisle, her hip nearly bumping into the cart. “I don’t think it fucking matters.”

“Okay, but like. Do you?”

“Not in the sense of there being, like, some puppetmaster god pulling your strings up there. But there’s shit like social conditioning that prevents you from picking amongst, let us say, the broadest possible array of choices. Like, for example, I guess I _could_ have decided to ask my dad for help this weekend, but, of course I couldn’t? Or, did you really have a choice to come here and help me? Like, what were you going to say, no? There’s a zillion little reasons why you wouldn’t.”

“I could have said no,” Kent insists.

“Yeah.” She has a knowing little smile on her face. “But like, could you have?”

“Yes?” he guesses.

“Well, you don’t sound so sure, Kenny, do you?”

He grabs the cart with both hands. “Look at this,” he says, staring down at the pile of random things Greer expects him to buy her. “You don’t need all this shit. Let’s get you some disinfectant wipes and shampoo and let’s go. I have to get back to Syracuse.”

“I don’t use Target shampoo,” she complains, but she trails after him regardless.

* * *

Kent is of a mind to unceremoniously dump her in front of her dorm, but he remembers that he doesn’t want her physically exerting herself. “I’ll help you carry this up,” he says, putting the blinkers on in front of her confab, over-nice new dorm building. He didn’t get a real look at it the previous morning; the residence hall he saw when he went with Jack to drop her at school last August was a stately old pile, an artist’s rendering come alive. All things considered, this new place might be more comfortable for living; it seems more effectively climate-controlled, for example, when he helps her drag the five overflowing shopping bags and bulk package of paper towels into the elevator. She lives on the fifth floor, which Kent only learns because she’s jabbing that button like it hurt her very deeply.

“You like your roommates?” he asks, because he realizes suddenly that he’s showed almost no interest in her life at school.

“I don’t have any.”

“Does it get lonely?”

“You haven’t been to college,” she says. “Thank the lord I have a single. There’s people freaking everywhere.”

And yet the halls seem fairly deserted. He asks where everyone is. “Late lunch,” she says. “Library, game, I dunno. Maybe they’re just in their rooms.”

“What game?”

She pushes one of the bags out of the elevator once the door opens. “I know it would be a nice thing to ask my dad to come see a hockey game. It’s been brought to my attention already.”

“That wasn’t what I was fishing for.”

“What were you fishing for?” She pauses in front of what he assumes is her room.

He puts the paper towels down. “Just making conversation.”

“Ah.” She seems, at last, like she doesn’t know what to do. “Well, I don’t know.”

He feels like he should just leave, but, he kind of stands there, not sure what to do. “This is so hard,” he says, not meaning for her to hear it.

“No it’s not. It’s pretty easy. Bye, Kenny.” She waves. “Thanks for helping me out and buying me some shit at Target.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s no problem. Jack should give you a credit card, then you won’t have to deal with getting cash from Bittle every month. I’ll tell him.”

“I don’t know that I really need that, but, okay. Thanks.”

“And like—I’m serious about Thanksgiving? It would make him _so_ happy.”

“Yeah, I dunno. I’ll talk to my dad, I guess. Or maybe I just won’t do anything and end up in Georgia regardless. You know.”

“We’ll buy you a ticket, or whatever—”

“Okay.”

“And I’m not going to tell Jack about—you know, the whole thing.”

“It’s appreciated, thanks.”

“I wish I knew how to say this.”

“Well, you’re saying an awful lot of things. Maybe you don’t want to leave?”

“No, I have to get out of here, it’s just.” He sighs. “Getting to know you hasn’t been the worst part of being your dad’s boyfriend. To borrow that phrase.”

“Um, I know you care about me? That’s why I asked you.” She pulls her keys out of the pocket of her hoodie. “I won’t be angry if you marry my dad, okay? Don’t not do it on my account. But, can you please go now? I need to change my pad.”

“Okay,” he agrees. “Just, think about Thanksgiving.”

“I will,” she promises. “I’ll talk to my dad, I said!”

“Great, all right. See you then, maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

And then he’s finally free to trudge back to the elevator, which he bypasses. Instead, he goes down the stairs.

No one’s towed his car yet, which is nice. A couple of college kids are checking it out. They ask him about the model, and in case they recognize him he tries to be very cool and collected. It becomes clear after a few questions about the specs on the mileage that they are genuinely interested in the car, and not in Kent Parson. He’s grateful for that; it makes it easier to get the fuck out of there.

* * *

Hotdish threatens a second act the moment Kent steps into his mother’s condo. “Leftovers,” she says, when he asks her what’s for dinner. “Why, you don’t want it? It’s still pretty good.”

“Still, nothing. It wasn’t good the first time. Are we really going to do this?”

“You know I don’t eat much. I’ve still got most of a good hotdish.”

“Mother, I’m a fucking millionaire. We’re going out to dinner.”

“ _Kent V. Parson_ ,” she begins.

“I’m going out to dinner and you can come or not come. You wanna feed the cats before, or after?”

Defying all trends and probabilities, she relents, saying, “Fine, _fine_ ,” like he’s asked her to get into one of the lifeboats without him, and there was a chance she might miss him when he drowned. “Before,” she finally decides. “I’ll gussy up. You make the bowls.”

It has never made sense to him that they inherently know the ratio of one bowl of food to one cat. People don’t get that, _his_ cats don’t get that—but his mother’s do.

Kent isn’t sure what he was expecting. Maybe she is old now, even if she doesn’t much look it, the kind of old where you don’t have the energy to argue, just go along the path of least resistance. The phrase “out to dinner” wasn’t in his vocabulary until he got to Rimouski, where the guys were always going out to dinner, either as a group or with whichever girls they were wheeling; maybe Kent took a girl out to dinner then, to see if he could. Mostly he went out to dinner with Jack, though Jack’s tastes ran to French fries and soft-serve, hot dogs and burgers piled with two or three patties, eating pizza and roast beef sandwiches in the backseat of the same car they made out in after practice. At Kent’s billet they went out to dinner sometimes, and it seemed both special and normal, if it could be that at the same time.

“They do a fish fry at the Shipwright,” Karan announces when emerging from the bedroom. She’s put on lipstick—for Hollis, or for her, but surely not for Kent—and changed out of her jeans into a dress that looks like she cut it herself in the 1990s. She probably did; Brigid learned to sew behind the closed door to their mother’s bedroom. It’s a vaguely African-tribal print, though Kent isn’t sure how he knows that. He tries to understand and not be embarrassed.

“Do you want to go to the fish fry at the Shipwright?” he asks.

“No,” she replies, like she thinks he’s an idiot, “that’s Friday nights. It’s Sunday, Sundays are prime rib.”

“Do you want prime rib?”

“Actually.” She purses her lips, like she’s thinking. “I thought, the nice Italian place.”

“Well, wherever,” Kent agrees, because so long as it’s not hotdish he literally could not give a flying fuck where they go or what they eat. He’s been here twenty minutes and his flannel is matted with cat hair. He ought to get a lint roller and take care of it if he doesn’t want to get home and drive his own cats crazy. He probably has one in the car.

He texts Jack, “Mom and I are going out to dinner.”

Immediately: “Why? What happened?”

“I refuse to eat any more hotdish. I deserve real food. We’re getting Italian.”

Jack takes this as a cue to tell Kent what he’s been eating: “I finished the pizza from two nights ago, the bean salad from Tuesday, the smoked salmon you left and made some of the wild rice from the pantry.”

“Did you put butter in it, or olive oil?”

It takes Jack a minute to write back, “No comment.”

There’s no hint as to when Jack ate all of this, and Kent doesn’t ask.

“I’ll see if I can get her to let me help out,” Kent tells him, just trying to be informative. “I’d love to get wood floors in here.” He sends it, pauses, thinks. Types, “I wish she’d let me buy her a new house.”

“A whole house?” Jack inquires.

“Nice condo in the city, near Brig, elevator building.”

“Live-in help is great.”

“Not there yet,” Kent writes. “Don’t want to get there.”

“We all get there.”

Yes, Kent thinks, but do we plummet into it, or are we led with ease? Does it upend our lives, or does it unfurl before us like a road we meant to take? He’s seen men carried off the ice on stretchers. He’s been carried off the ice, Jack’s been carried off the ice. Not playing was never the answer, but how much worse if there’d been no one there to carry you?

He spends dinner angling: “I just wish you’d let me put in wood floors. They last longer and they don’t get as fucked-up so easily.”

“Course they do,” she argues. “They scratch, Kenny.”

“Okay, so? Carpet stains. But at least wood you can sweep, you can use a Swiffer or you can wipe up. It’s not all full of cat hair and dust.”

She’s barely pecking at the bruschetta she’s had on her plate for twenty minutes; beside it, the oysters Rockefeller have gone cold. (He did talk her into ordering a glass of wine, though; second-most expensive on the menu at twenty-four dollars.)

“Your sister doesn’t do this,” she tells him, like that’s supposed to be a good thing. “She just lets me live my life.”

“And that’s somehow better?” Kent has ordered veal Milanese; his mother, seafood lasagna, which takes 45 minutes to bake. He hasn’t told her, you know, you just pretty much ordered a hotdish.  He wouldn’t, because where would it get him? But he’s right. He wishes she knew how often he was right.

She leans over her plate, so she can get up in his physical space. They’re the same height, and she would be stocky if she ate and weren’t so slight, but he hasn’t found her physically imposing since he was very young. “You know what happened when my mother died?”

He wracks his brain, trying to recall when he might have heard this story last. “No,” he says finally. “Refresh my memory.”

She sits back. “Can’t, sorry.” She crosses her arms, right over the vibrant, unearned pattern across her chest. “Maybe she didn’t yet, for all I know. I left in eighty-nine, as you know, and that was really the last I heard from there. I guess she’d be in her nineties or over a hundred now, and I think people up there are hardy, but she had eight babies—well, two is bad enough, I don’t mind telling you that. She probably died at some point.”

“Probably,” Kent agrees, before she’ll continue.

“So, look. I grew up. I went and did things. I always did wonder, would they see one of you on the TV and call me up and say, Karan, I’m sorry, look at these kids you raised? So I didn’t like to pick up the phone. And I wouldn’t want you to worry that maybe I was going to call. And, see, the opposite is true as well. We come into the world alone, Kenny. No point in trying to bind people to you. That just creates a source of friction.”

“Yeah?” he asks. “How’s that wine?”

She empties the glass on her next sip. When set sets it down, she says, “Drier than I like. Next glass, I ought to do white. For the seafood, you know.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, “the seafood.” What he’s thinking is, what a bitch. What a motherfucking entitled selfish heartless frigid bitch.

* * *

Kent doesn’t pick up his phone again until it’s after dinner and he is back in the twin bed at his mother’s, cats kicking litter across the carpet—specifically it’s the stray. He could fight her about it, but, why? What’s she going to do, listen to him? He’d better get out of here first thing in the morning. He reaches for his cell to set an alarm—and there is a text from Greer.

“Thanks again,” it says. “I really feel okay, it’s like a light period. I promise to be careful. I’ll ask my dad about Thanksgiving.”

What do you say to someone? Kent thinks. What do you tell them, what do you want her to know?

“Thanks for trusting me,” he writes back.

She sends him an emoji, a heart. Kids still do that, he guesses.

It’s been a really long time.

* * *

Jack greets him in the driveway to grab the bag. “Good trip?” he asks, a sight for sore eyes: he put on jeans, an undershirt, an open flannel. He combed his hair, in the sad way he’ll comb it when he wants to look good: up and over, like his dad always has. It doesn’t stay like that. Kent thinks that’s cute.

“I can get my own bag,” Kent says, moving toward the trunk. “Were you waiting for me?” Like a dog, Kent thinks, instinctual, not sure why he’s doing it.

“I heard you coming up the driveway.” Is that any better? “Seriously, I’ve got it.” Jack hefts it from the car with one arm and shuts the trunk with the other. “You must be tired,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

It’s weirdly emasculating; Kent _can_ do it, and he wants to, but it’s hardly the time to have a fight about his weekend bag, for fuck’s sake. He lets Jack take it, trailing behind. “How was everything?” He listens for the little chirp signaling that the doors have locked, as soon as he’s far enough away from the car with the keys in his jacket pocket. He doesn’t relax until he hears it.

By then, Jack is saying, “Everything’s fine. We had some pied-billed grebes early this morning. Looking for dross around the patio out the living room windows. I was watching.” He slows down, waits for Kent to catch up. “Cats loved that. Think we need to get a guy out there to clear the deck for the winter. Want it clean by Thanksgiving.”

“Why, will people judge us by deck cleanliness?”

“No. I just prefer a clean deck.” Now he stops. “I went down to the water to see what they were doing.”

“What were they doing?”

“Fishing,” Jack says. “Diving down with their babies on their backs.”

“Isn’t it a little late for grebes up here?”

“Just a couple stragglers.” Jack hasn’t put the bag down. “They’ll be gone soon, probably.”

“Not if they were nesting, I don’t think. They’ll stay to lay eggs, won’t they?”

“They already have babies. It’s not laying season.”

“Well, isn’t that the truth?”

Jack says, “Just come inside.” He adjusts his hold on the bag, turns, and heads to the front door. Once there, door closed, three cats wind their deceptive bodies around Kent’s ankles and shins as he first unlaces and then pulls off his boots. There’s soft purring, much chatter; Kent stoops to pet them, his girls.

“Were you good?” he asks, stroking their cheeks and lacing their long tails through the webs of his fingers. “Were you all good for your daddy?”

“They were good,” Jack says, his voice unreadable. Then: “I have a daughter.”

Kent stands up, straightening out his flannel. “I know, Zimms, don’t remind me.”

“But, yeah,” he says. “They were good.” He steps forward, like he’s asking if it’s okay. Hazel rubs the top of one of his bare feet. “I think they missed you.”

“They the only ones who missed me, maybe?”

“No, I definitely missed you.” Awkwardly, Jack puts his hand on the base of Kent’s skull and draws him slightly nearer, coming down just an inch or two, but those are one or two _quite_ pronounced inches. He kisses the top of Kent’s head. He smashes his nose into Kent’s hair, arms around his shoulders. He’s got to stand on the tips of his toes to do it: “God,” he says, before switching to French, “I hate being alone.”

“Then why’d you want to move to a lake in the middle of nowhere?”

Jack’s got no answer for that.

“Come on,” Kent says, clapping his back. “I should get my coat off. And I need to get unpacked.”

“I’ll take the bag.”

“You _really_ don’t have to,” Kent begins to say, but before it’s all out of his mouth, Jack’s got it over his shoulder and is heading upstairs with it.

Just trudge along, Kent thinks to himself, just follow. He should never indulge this overbearing macho bullshit. It doesn’t work on him; it’s too passive aggressive. It’s the first thing in his toolkit, the first trick out of his bag: physically overpower, burn through it, form a wall. To take that away from Kent seems like a cruelty: he can carry his own bag, for fuck’s sake. He should sprint out ahead of Jack and let him struggle up the stairs with the thing; instead, Kent is two steps behind him the whole way, telling Jack about how his mother _finally_ agreed to replace the carpet, and how she’s begun taking in untagged strays.

“Either they belong to someone and she ought to take them to a vet to get the chips read,” he explains, “or they’re feral and she ought to take them to a vet to get checked.”

“Our cats don’t have tags,” Jack offers. He puts the bag on the bed and unzips it.

“You want to tag em?” Kent asks. “They’re indoor cats, they don’t need it.” He bats Jack’s hands away from his clothing. “I’ll unpack it, I’ll unpack it. Sit down, you’re fine.”

That’s when Hazel comes trotting in, looking up at them, whining.

“Did you feed her?” Kent asks. He’s already pulling things out; better to get everything on the bed so he can see, clearly, what’s to be sorted, clean from dirty; what’s to be re-folded and put away.

“I did everything.” Jack sits, finally, sighing as his weight settles, patting his lap so the cat’ll come over and hop on. She does, with a little noise, and then she struts over to the pile of clothes.

“What?” Kent asks her when she stares up at him, open-mouthed yowling. “These are my shirts, see? These are my boxers.” He tosses them onto my bed. “These are dirty undershirts. These are socks.”

The cat takes a pair of socks in her mouth. “I don’t think so,” Kent tells her, and he swats at her nose.

She drops the socks, turns to Jack, meows at him.

“Make yourself useful, if you want,” Kent says. “Put these socks away?”

“In a minute.” Jack is petting the cat with two crooked fingers, running his knuckles from under her chin to the tips of her ears.

“Never mind.” Kent scoops the socks into his arms, carries them to the closet.

“Cats slept here,” Jack calls to him, while he’s stuffing socks into a drawer.

“What?” Kent sticks his head out of the closet.

“I let them sleep here. In the bed with me.”

It’s surprising, but all Kent can manage is, “Okay.”

“I was lonely,” Jack continues.

“Okay.”

“Can you put the cat out of the room?” Jack asks. “I want to tell you something.”

“Okay,” Kent says slowly. “You can tell me something.” He gets up and does it, Hazel flopping into his arms, soft and dead, a perfect ragdoll. He puts her on the floor outside of the room. “Sorry,” he says, while she looks at him, hurt and worry in her big eyes. “Sorry, babe.” She just blinks at him. Well, he thinks, whatever, cats don’t really understand things. Slowly, he shuts the door.

On the bed, Jack seems miserable. “When Bittle was breaking up with me, he said something I think about a lot. He said, ‘I want to be your friend, but I don’t think you know how to have friends.’ It hurt me a lot, at the time. Feels strange to admit it. But, I don’t think he was wrong.”

Kent wants to be offended on Jack’s behalf. He wants to say something supportive like, “What a bitch” or, “The nerve of him.” But he doesn’t think Bittle was wrong, either, and he isn’t sure where Jack is going with this. He keeps his mouth shut.

“He also said he thought I was scary. Do you think I’m scary?”

Kent knows he can answer that one honestly, without telling Jack he agrees. “I’ve never been afraid of you,” he says. “You don’t scare me.”

“I didn’t think that was fair of him. I’m the one who’s scared, you know?”

“I know, Jack.”

“And it seemed not nice. To say that to me.”

“I don’t think he’s as nice as people think he is.”

“He can be the nicest person in the universe,” Jack says. “But, he hasn’t been to me for a while. Still, he had a point there, I think. I don’t have friends. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need people, Parse. I don’t want to be your friend. I want to be your husband.”

Kent wants to say that there’s quite a lot of road between point A, friends, and point B, husbands. He doesn’t say anything.

“When I asked you, it just seemed right. But I don’t want to be alone, Parse. If you leave for the weekend I need to know you’re coming back.”

“Can’t you just take my word for it?”

Jack just shrugs.

“I don’t like marriage,” Kent says. “Seems like a scam.”

“It’s not a scam,” Jack tells him. “I’ve done it, you haven’t. You ought to trust me, eh? Kenny, trust me.”

The old Jack Zimmermann double-bind: trust me that marriage isn’t a scam, despite the evidence, but I can’t trust you to come back to me without it.

I loved you for years, Kent thinks, across time zones and borders, while I was struggling and you were, separately, and you couldn’t talk to me and I wanted to so badly I would drive through the night just to see you, just to get one look at your face. That I would be here even though I’m not the one you really want, that I would move to another country, that I would live in isolation with a lake and the woods for company beside you, miles from any city, a city where they don’t or at least don’t primarily speak my language, that I live with foreign words in my ears every day of my life and tell myself it’s not confusing and I’m not lost because you’re here to translate, even if you steadfastly refuse to because it’s better for “learning,” whatever that means when you’re an old dog and all you remember is what you soaked up back when you were a young sponge. Sometimes you put in nothing and sometimes you put in much too much, and I don’t know which it’s going to be when I get up in the morning, and asking me to marry you is the latter, so why are you acting like it’s the former? I could stand here and scream in your face all of your faults, all of the little things I know would hurt you, but I’m not, and because I’m not, you don’t even appreciate that I’m not, you just think—I don’t know what you think and it terrifies me, Kent thinks.

Jesus, he’s not smart, he’s a hockey player, he doesn’t have critical-thinking skills, so why is he trying to use his brain to get out of this?

Go with your gut, Parser, he thinks to himself. His gut is telling him, “Do not plight yourself to this man.”

But what if he says no, and Jack says he doesn’t want to be in a relationship without a marriage? Kent tells himself to just ask, he should just ask, but he doesn’t even want to know what Jack will say to _that_ —“no,” probably. And Kent doesn’t want to hear that “no,” wouldn’t be able to live the rest of his life knowing he had this, twice, and lost it, twice, all because he was too dumb to make it easy.

This is why I need an agent to make these decisions for me, Kent thinks. This is why I pay people to tell me what to do.

Kent has tears in his eyes when he gives Jack his troth. He doesn’t full-on sob, like Jack will sometimes do. But Kent’s eyes are prone to brim with tears that he doesn’t wipe away because he hates the feel of them on his fingers. The thing is, he cries when he’s angry. “Fine,” he says, “I’ll marry you, fuck.” It doesn’t sound like he wants to. It sounds like he’s telling Jack to fuck off.

Never doubt that Jack will ignore the tone, or misread it, or whatever. “Oh, good,” he says, just happy to get his way.

They fuck to seal the deal; Jack burns another pill on it. Morbidly, Kent pauses to consider if he shouldn’t put a stop to things; what if Jack were to have a heart attack? He doesn’t, though he does cry while Kent is so deep in him that their asses are practically touching. Jack’s is pretty large so maybe it’s not that impressive, but Kent is charmed and he gets off on the thought of it. It’s only when he’s licking the tears from Jack’s cheeks and listening to the fierce pulse of Jack’s blood in his neck that Kent thinks, jesus, what have I done?

* * *

“Maybe I’m having a hard time with it because when I was 18 and that was what I wanted, I didn’t think there was any future where we got married,” Kent tells his therapist.

“Because of hockey?” she asks.

“Well, yeah, clearly because of hockey, but I meant more like, because it wasn’t legal in 2009 or whatever, definitely not in Nevada, which had the first draft pick, but also, not in New York either, and not only was I from there but they had the second pick, so I guess I just kind of didn’t even consider it as a fantasy because it was like, well. Even—even pushing all that hockey shit aside, were it a better world in the first place, if we were together, and we came out, and wanted to be married—where would we even _be_ married? Not that we talked about that as teenagers, right, but what I’m saying is, it wasn’t possible, so I didn’t think of it. I didn’t think of it and now—holy shit.” Kent waits for her to say something, but she doesn’t. “But in our industry, or whatever, you never know where you’re going to end up next year—this year, even, with the trade deadline. Do a lot of your patients think ‘holy shit’ about getting married?”

“Some of them,” she says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

“None of that train of thought makes any sense, by the way,” Kent continues. “Maybe I didn’t think about it, I mean, I dunno.”

“Well, it’s okay not to know.”

“Thanks,” Kent tells her, and he spends the rest of his day—his walk to the bagel shop, his walk to the park—considering why he’s so afraid of not knowing. His hip hurts, and Jack is texting him cat pictures, and snow is falling softly on the walking paths of the public park while Kent holds the bagel between his knees and texts Greer, “I decided I’m gonna marry him.”

She sends back three thumbs-up symbols.

He replies with a face pursing its lips together, blowing a kiss.

“Never thought I’d get a stepmom,” she writes.

Kent wants to be pissed, but his face feels flushed. He writes back, “Your stepmom would love to have you for Thanksgiving.”

It takes her a moment, but she manages to text, “I know. I’m considering it.”

Kent chews his bagel slowly, and thinks about his options.

Or, perhaps because he’s not thinking, he calls Bittle.

“No one died,” he says quickly, before Bittle can ask. “I’m calling with purpose.”

“Well, good gracious, Kent Parson, what don’t you do with purpose?” Fuck, that accent. It’s like a fucking spoonful of peanut butter, that accent. Bittle doesn’t mean it as a joke. “All right, well, hello to you, too.”

“Hey,” Kent says. “Thanks for taking my call. How’s your day going?”

“Oh, pretty well, just fine. I’ve got Cooking Light coming tomorrow for an interview to go with a recipe, so I’m trying to tidy the kitchen. You know, I keep a clean kitchen, but it would feel weird to have a reporter in here—reporter, well, more like a food writer—it would feel weird not to clean, you know? That’s what you do when someone’s coming over, you clean. Well, I clean, y’all probably hire someone.”

“I do both, I mean, with the cats, and it’s such a big place—we have someone in twice a week but, you know, I do my own thing, too. Every day.”

“Same, of course,” Bittle says, and it sounds like the window is open; Kent hears birdsong and windchimes. “You can’t do it all, but you want it done your way.”

“My mother had me cleaning when I was like, five,” Kent explains, “and then I lived in a billet, and then I lived with a vet my first year in Vegas. I’ve done a lot of cleaning, I guess I’m saying.”

What did Kent expect for this confession—praise? “Oh,” Bittle might have said, “you’re less of a stuck-up prick than I thought.” Instead, he asks, “So, what can I help you with?”

“No need to help me, I’m all right, but I was wondering, if you don’t have plans, I asked Greer to come up to Montreal for Thanksgiving. Sounds weird, I guess, but my mother won’t do it at her apartment this year, so she’s going to come up with my sister, and Bob and Alicia will come obviously, maybe some other people, and I just think it would make Jack really happy if, you know, Greer were to come.”

“You’re asking me if it’s okay if Greer comes for Thanksgiving?”

“Well, no, but I was thinking—probably it would make it easier for her if I invited you, too. Don’t you usually go to Georgia?”

“Usually.” Bitty sighs. “Every year of my life, more like.”

“So I guess you have plans, but, you know, if you didn’t—”

“That’s very decent of you. I don’t know, what kinda plans did you think I had?”

“Going to Georgia, I guess, or going—somewhere else? I mean, I don’t know about your social life, and Greer did mention you were seeing someone.”

“Hm. Well. I guess she inherited my big mouth, that one. I been seeing someone, sure, but not like—not someone I’d go home with for Thanksgiving, or whatnot. It’s awfully soon for that and all. If it gets there. Who’s to say? You’d like him, though, Kent, probably. Or maybe not. Shouldn’t assume.”

“Okay.” Kent pauses. “But, I’m serious. This is a serious invitation.”

“Oh, trust, I take all invitations at face value.”

“We won’t make you bake us any pies.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, Kent, honey, but I like making pies. It’s not Thanksgiving without pie.”

“I’m sure we can get one somewhere.”

“No, I mean—it’s not Thanksgiving unless I make a pie. It’s not Thanksgiving unless there’s a pie made by me. A few if I can help it. You like pecan?”

“Not really.”

“Traitorous,” Bitty says. “What about apple?”

“I love apple.”

“Glad to hear it. I haven’t been to Montreal in—oh, many years.”

“Well, we’re not properly in Montreal,” Kent says. “Like, an hour outside of it? The close town is Knowlton, but we’re on Lake Brome. It’s fine, it’s a big lake.”

“A long time since I been up there.” Kent hates the way he drops syllables like he’s leaving a trail that leads to actually fucking liking him. It’s infuriating—Kent has never even thought his damn pies were that great, not that he’s had one for a while. “All right, well, tell you what. I’ll talk to Greer, and I’ll think about it.”

“Think about it,” Kent repeats.

“Amazing Jack put you up to this.”

“He didn’t.”

“Oh!”

“All me,” Kent says. “My idea.”

“Not a bad idea,” Bitty replies. “Thank you kindly. I gotta think—my parents are like. I dunno.”

“Bring them too,” Kent offers. “Who cares? Why not?”

“They might feel weird about it. I’ll get back to you. Might be weird.”

“It shouldn’t be weird.” Kent is nervous about this next bit: “It’s just been a long time, and I don’t see the point in acting like it’s weird. It is what it is, Bittle.” He swallows. “We’re, um, going to get married.”

The truth is that Kent doesn’t know what he should expect out of Bittle: anger, shock, bitten-back loss? But when he says, “Oh my gosh, well,” it’s hard to say, and when he says, “Congratulations, Kent, really,” he seems to mean it. “I’m real happy for you. How wonderful.”

“Thanks, Bittle.”

“Oh, don’t be like that—I mean it! You’ve wanted this for a long time.”

Kent is acutely aware that Bittle knows just _how_ long, though he also obviously has no idea. “I guess I have,” he agrees. “But it’s not—my damn hand is getting cold, so just—think about it, get back to me? I don’t see the point in dividing things, not anymore. Greer should be with both her dads. Why make things harder?”

Bitty is quiet. “What kind of apples you get up there?

Kent doesn’t miss a beat: “All of them, Bittle. You name it.”

“I need four large Honeycrisps and one Braeburn. Northern Spy would work, too.”

“I can do that,” Kent says. “You don’t want something local?”

“You think we had local varieties growing up in Madison, Georgia?” Bitty pauses. “Truly asking. Answer: no. We had Publix.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“Never you mind Publix,” Bitty says. “I ain’t promising anything. Just let me do some thinking, talk to Greer. Sound okay?”

“Sounds great,” Kent agrees, and he ends the phone call feeling, for the first time in a while, like he’s won.

* * *

“Call your ex,” Kent tells Jack. “I invited him to Thanksgiving.”

“Why would you do that?” Jack asks, but he’s wide-eyed, childlike, all pupils.

“So Greer would come. That okay?”

Jack never responds, at least, not in words. He hugs Kent though, fast and tight, burying his head in the crook of Kent’s neck and pressing Kent’s arms to the sides of his body. He hasn’t even got his coat off, he’s just come right through the door.

“Jesus,” Jack says, finally, when he lets go. “I hope she does.”

Kent listens to every word of that call, draped over Jack’s shoulder while he talks to Bittle on the phone. It’s stilted between them, because it has to be, but there’s a deep root in the ground there, too. Kent hears Bittle prattling, “Yes, I think it’s a very thoughtful offer, I know, but I said I had to talk to my parents—oh, they’d love to see you, I’m sure, they’d love to see you, but they do it their way down there, I’m afraid, not that I need to tell you.”

It’s natural for Kent to wonder if Bittle knows he’s listening in, because when they spoke a few hours ago, he hadn’t said his parents would love to see Jack; he said they’d find it weird coming up to Knowlton. Hard not to admire Bittle for that, though: know your audience, Kent thinks to himself, and handle them delicately.

Or: “But, married! That’s something.”

“I like being married,” Jack says. “I miss it.”

“It was good for you, sweetheart, wasn’t it?” Bitty sighs, and Kent can hear it; it is a long, long sigh. “I’m always going to be sorry about all that, you know.”

Kent thinks about how some of the oldest trees on the property are some of the gnarliest, how when they bought the house there was an American beech with roots the size of their legs—power-forward legs, that was, _their_ legs specifically—and even larger, roots big enough to lie on, and they were upsetting some corner of the garage foundations, and it took tens of thousands of dollars to hack the problem away and rebuild one corner of the structure. If that tree wasn’t towering, if it wasn’t majestic—but it was destructive, and strong, but destructive, and ugly, and it took a backhoe and forty-thousand dollars Canadian to extract its treacherous hinds from the earth. It was still out there by the garage, standing in spite, unassailable.

Fuck it, Kent thinks to himself, as soon as he’s off the phone with Bittle I’m calling Piscines-et-Spas and ordering a new hot tub.

Kent is snatched from the thought of his replacement hot tub when he hears Jack say, “Please tell her to call me.” Fuck, he sounds so broken. “I want her to—ask her myself. I don’t want to wait until New Years. I want to see her, Bits. I just—I worry.”

“I know you worry, sweetheart,” Bittle says, “I know you worry, I know you do.” He sounds sympathetic. “And she should call you more, Jack, I know, and I tell her that. But nothing bad is going to happen, I promise. She’s going to be fine.”

“How can you promise? You can’t know.”

“You’re right,” Bittle agrees, “I can’t know. I don’t know. But I just say it, because I have to believe it, right? It’s like what I said, you remember, I made _you_ promises—and, Jack, I really meant them. I really believed in em. But I didn’t know. But that’s the fundamental nature of things, isn’t it—you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re young. You gotta be patient with her, sweetheart, if she doesn’t want to go to Canada for Thanksgiving. Remember me at nineteen? Remember you?”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Jack says.

“And that’s the point.” Bittle takes a deep breath. “I gotta go. I gotta finish tidying up for a shoot tomorrow. I’ll talk to Greer, and you talk to Greer, and I’ll talk to my parents—things have a way of working themselves out. Nothing bad will happen.”

It’s amazing to Kent how quickly Jack acquiesces: “Okay,” he says, and it’s very small. “Okay, Bits.”

“I’ll get back to you A-sap, okay? You give my love to everybody.”

“I will,” Jack agrees.

“Okay, sweetheart, I know you will. Thanks for calling, Jack. Bye, Kenny.”

With the phone in his hands, Jack sits a moment, eyes closed, breathing. Kent is not thinking, is it going to be bad? but, rather, how bad is it going to be? He puts a hand on Jack’s thigh. Jack’s breathing slow, evens. How did Bittle know he was listening in, anyway?

Finally, Jack says, voice straining, “Talk to Greer. Like it’s easy.”

“Send her an e-mail, Zimms.”

“But, Bittle said to call—”

“Okay, but that’s what he’d do. You don’t have to do it right this second—why don’t you take a nap, and I’ll see what we need from the IGA, and later I can help you draft something.” When Jack doesn’t respond, Kent adds, “It doesn’t have to be a long e-mail, it can just say, I miss you, I don’t want to wait to New Years to see you, please come up for Thanksgiving, I’ll buy you a ticket.”

“How it that so easy for you?”

Because I already asked, Kent thinks. “Because she’s not my kid,” Kent says.

“Could you grab me some Advil?” Jack asks. “Headache.”

“Of course,” Kent agrees, getting up.

Two victories in one day.

* * *

A week out from Thanksgiving, Kent gets a text from Bittle. “I’m working on my parents,” it says, “and I know it’s rude to keep you waiting.”

“I’m getting the same amount of turkey either way,” Kent writes back. “It’s a low-stakes situation.”

“My mother wants to make a sweet potato pie.”

“I’ve never had one.”

“You’d think it was pumpkin if no one told you otherwise.”

“What if you had both?” Kent asks.

“They’re pretty different,” Bittle tells him. “When they’re side by side you can tell.”

Kent’s mother has committed to pre-assembling a pan of Stovetop dressing; Brigid has promised to pick up a few bottles of wine. Kent hasn’t mentioned that she ought not bother, that they could raid Bob’s collection for every meal until he dies and still inherit quite a bounty. Alicia wants him to hand it over to an auction house. It’s no business of Kent’s what they do with it, so he stays out of the discussion. He asks Brigid to bring five bottles of white, five of red, two sparkling, one rose. “For losers,” he clarifies, though he’s unsure what the Bittles drink, if indeed they’re coming at all. It doesn’t feel low-stakes.

“Wish I knew what my plans were,” Greer texts him.

“Hey,” he writes back, “they’re your grandparents, you deal with it.”

“Because I don’t know what I want,” she writes back.

“Well,” he tells her, “join the club.”

Brigid calls in the evening and gives him a hard time: “You really need thirteen bottles of wine?”

“I don’t know what people want to drink,” he says. “You’re driving, Brig, just take it home if we don’t drink it.”

“Yeah, good point, I’m already picking up Mom, now I need to bring a whole liquor store?”

“You might be glad we have it. Things might get tense. I’m trying to get Greer to come, and she won’t come unless Bittle comes, and Bittle won’t come unless his parents come, and from what I hear his parents won’t come unless his mother’s sister promises not to serve their mother’s pecan pie while Bittle’s mother’s not in town to make it herself, and honestly—I’m just trying to be diplomatic, you know? Let’s be a family for once.”

“About that,” she says. “What’d you tell Jack?”

“I tell him a lot of things,” Kent replies.

“No, I mean, about what he asked you. About—”

“Oh, yes.” Kent swallows. It’s snowing outside, too warm to stick, so ash-light flurries land on the window and vanish into the faintest trace of liquid. “I said I’d do it.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really.”

“That’s great,” she says, instead of congratulations. “Just let me know what I can do, Kenny, okay?”

“What could you possibly do?” he asks. “I mean, aside from bringing wine.”

“You need suits? You need help curating a guest list?”

Kent is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know that it’s going to be that kind of wedding.”

“You really ought to find out, then,” she says. “Is there a date? You gonna take his name?”

“No way, I’m not the woman. He can hyphenate.”

“Here’s what I know about myself. I’m never getting married. But, if I didn’t have to be a Parson, I wouldn’t be.”

“I did always want to be a Zimmermann,” he confesses, “like, when I was a kid? Before we started—and, I mean, even after, I never thought about getting married. I thought, this would be nice. These people seem stable. Well-adjusted.”

“Oh my god.”

“Well, look, I wasn’t a smart kid. They just, you know, had friends, went to parties, went out to dinner. Regular dinners, by the way, with an entrée and two side dishes. I would think to myself, shit, this seems nice, two parents, good overhead lighting, someone to drive you to the rink. I mean, obviously, it wasn’t like that. Or, no, it _was_ like that, but when you’re a dumb kid you don’t know that—well, you don’t know anything, really. Maybe I still don’t, I don’t know. Maybe this is stupid. But, no, I don’t want to be a Zimmermann. I mean, any more than I am already.”

“You _are_ old,” she says.

“Yeah. Seems like a lot of paperwork. I mean, what do you do, do you call Toronto and ask them to edit all the record books?”

“You’re a guy, so.”

“So what?”

“So maybe you didn’t slowly realize it wasn’t going to happen,” she says. “You know what? Never mind. Never mind.”

“It is happening, Brigid,” he says. “And I’m fuckin’ terrified.”

* * *

Kent orders a turkey from J&R, or tries to. He asks for a thirty-pounder. “I’ll set you straight,” says the girl on the phone, her French strained through what sounds, to Kent, like a deep-Brooklyn whine. “How many are you feeding? You don’t want a big turkey. Get two medium turkeys.”

“You think so?” Kent asks.

“I know so, chum, I work for a butcher.”

“Because I’m feeding fifteen to twenty, and we’re hockey players, and some of us are very hungry.”

“Two fifteens is the better way to go.”

“Well, okay,” he agrees, “since you’re the expert.”

“Oh, really, I’m the expert. What’s your thing? Most men who put in an order, they don’t listen.”

“That a scientific fact?”

“Anecdata,” she says, which makes Kent laugh. “Okay, I’ll put in your order. What’s your name?”

He very gladly tells her.

* * *

It’s hockey night at home, though when is it not? Time moves at a tight clip when guests are coming; Kent has been on a party-prep fury, crossing “sweet potatoes” off his list and adding “ask Traiteur can bartender help w cleanup.” Bartenders usually won’t, but they may if you pay them extra—of course, when he asks Jack what _he_ thinks, Jack says, “Why don’t you ask him to do it under the table?” and when Kent doesn’t respond, Jack clarifies, “I mean, for extra money.”

“I got it,” Kent assures him, at the same time Jack pulls Kent away from the notepad by the hand and says, “You wanted to see the Denver game.”

“I wanted to see the Aces game”—but Denver is a divisional rival, and a new one at that, following the reshuffle a few years back. They’re good, too, which has Kent all worried. Every season he promises himself he’ll stop caring about the fate of a spunky, improbable hockey team he hasn’t represented in going-on fifteen years. Every year, he fails.

“Who are you rooting for?” Jack jokes, or tries to joke—

But the thing is, it doesn’t really matter who wins. Kent can tell himself that now, quietly; he could never say it to Jack’s face. Hockey is 82 games and no one has ever won them all. He likes the team, sure; he even loves the Aces, could never will himself to not identify, would vastly prefer their success to the alternative. But winning, Kent knows, is naught but a temporary condition. Win now to lose later; win this game to lose that one. Win this boy’s heart to lose it later only to regain it and that’s a victory for you and a concession for him, a triumph that, through the warped pane of glass that is personal experience, looks like a failure.

“You’re not funny,” Kent says, and he stretches himself onto the couch in front of that monstrous TV and slouches into Jack, who makes fun of him whenever Vegas commits an error, as if Kent has committed an error, and as if the Aces’ performance (underperformance?) bothers Jack one way or the other.

Over the course of the game, Kent sinks lower and lower, until it is the third period and he is curled on his side, pressure off his bad hip, Hazel nesting under the shelter of his abs, and Jack’s thigh a kind of pillow. Jack pets the cat as absently as he pets Kent’s hair, his fingers moving as slowly between them as the puck on his unproductive power play: from one to another, back and forth.

Just for a moment, before he passes out like that, Kent wonders why, in all of his dreams of growing old with Jack, did he never think of something like this: domestic drama, party planning, and the lullaby of largely inconsequential early-season hockey on surround-sound.

At one point, Jack asks, “You asleep there, buddy?”

And Kent says, “No,” because he isn’t. He watches the Aces lose—though it’s close, he’s pleased to think—and he falls asleep soon after.

* * *

Greer’s flight comes in on Tuesday night. To Kent’s surprise, Jack asks him to come to the airport to fetch her.

Kent is on flight-status duty the whole drive, refreshing the American Airlines app and managing Jack’s expectations. He doesn’t inform Jack that the flight is said to be arriving fifteen minutes late, and he doesn’t advise Jack as that figure contracts to the point where they’re 15 minutes from the airport but Greer should be landing five minutes early. All things considered, Kent figures, it will all even out. He doesn’t tell Jack that he’s noticed that Jack never wants to drive anymore when they’re in the car together unless Greer is present, too, or that it was only recently that Jack stopped liking or even tolerating music in the car more often than not, and that now they mostly spend their drives in silence. But when you live with someone, how often do you need to chat with him? Jack would want to listen to country, anyway, or the stale groan of classic rock, and sure as Kent can’t remember what they listened to the last time they made a drive together of more than a half hour—to Quebec City, weeks back now—Kent doesn’t need to listen to any more of that.

Jack is so excited it seems he’s forgotten the recent terminal redesign, and Kent has to lead him back toward baggage claim.

“She checked a bag,” Jack explains, for what must be the fifth or sixth time that day.

“You can afford the fee,” Kent tells him, like that’s really the issue.

It’s the airport, so they get a few stares; Kent thinks about getting a coffee from the kiosk on the other side of the arrivals hall, but for some odd reason he doesn’t want to leave Jack, or maybe he just wants to see Greer. He spots her first, which is the sort of thing that Jack would find annoying, and yet Kent cannot help shouting her name down the corridor, as if it hasn’t been just shy of two weeks.

She shakes her head, a backpack slung over one shoulder and an uncharacteristic grin on her face. It’s weird; she has Jack’s beatific smile when she’s actually happy, a true expression that’s never fraudulent, never plastered on, and always very welcome.

“Thanks for springing for first class,” she says, shrugging the bag off and dumping it on the floor. “They really speed you through customs.”

“Greer.” Jack spreads his arms, like in celebration, and wraps them around his daughter, nearly engulfing her in his considerable breadth and height. “Tu m'as manqué,” he says into her hair. “C'est le fun de t’voir ici…”

Kent watches this because it’s rare: Jack’s blunt affection so naked, his need for her presence a simple thing unspoilt by vanity or fear. The rest of the weekend might be a bloodbath, for all Kent knows, but this one moment is good, and Kent revels in it. All he ever dreamed of was seeing Jack happy like this. In Kent’s fantasies it was always him that Jack had missed, him that Jack so badly wanted to see. But this is nearly as good, Kent figures: both of them happy to see someone else at the same time.

Jack lets her go and she says, “Hi, Dad,” in a perfectly even way, betraying no frustration at having had to fly into another country or disrupt her long-held (if not well-anticipated) plans to go south for the holiday.

Jack hoists her bag up, “Let me take this,” and Greer puts up no protest. (Kent only realizes a split second after it’s happened that she must not be able to understand Jack, hasn’t since he first embraced her: Jack is speaking French.) She glides to the baggage claim and waits. Remarkable how the system hasn’t improved since the first time Kent took a plane somewhere, he thinks. Upsetting how every single thing in a person’s life can become upturned and he’ll barely notice; that’s how slowly it happens.

“So.” She’s staring down at the belt as the bags begin to cycle around, no hint of recognition in her eyes yet. “Tell me about the wedding. When is it?”

“Low key,” Kent tells her, “and over New Year’s.”

“Oh, I’ll be here.”

“Yeah. When does your dad get in?”

“Tomorrow,” Greer says. “He’s flying up with my grandparents from Georgia. He said he’ll text you and he’s gonna rent a car. I want the wedding details.”

“No details,” Jack says. He puts a hand on her back, switches to English: “Like Kenny told you.”

“I said _low key_. Maybe one or two details.” Kent puts his hands up, takes a step back. “We’ll tell you in the car.” Greer makes a thumbs-up, and Kent retreats, another step and then another, until he’s far enough behind them to observe; just a few feet, but it’s enough.

Jack moves his hand from the small of her back to her shoulder, and he hunches down to kiss her hair and bury his face in it. Maybe it reminds him of intimacy with Bittle, or maybe it’s its own thing. Either way, Kent drinks in the sight of Jack with someone he can never really lose, even if he can’t possess her. He wonders what it was about it that made his father recoil in horror and retreat. Kent feels succored by it: he loves these people.

He likes this view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got through this, thanks so much for reading, and if you have questions or criticisms (I like concrit) about this fic as a whole, I'm pumped to discuss it with people.
> 
> I have other omgcp fics to write, some _South Park_ fics to write, and some work to do, but I might have more to add to this particular Greerverse, perhaps sooner rather than later. See you in 2018? 
> 
> Or sooner, if you bounce on my Tumblr: http://camilliar.tumblr.com/


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